Facial Recognition Software in Job Interviews

AI - POLITICO has been reporting on the increased use of facila recognition software. 

The age of facial recognition, how it is used: 

1 — To verify an identity: That’s when you use facial recognition to unlock your phone. The camera scans your face, turns it into biometric data and compares it to information it has stored. If the two datasets match (more or less), the system decides that you’re likely the phone’s owner and unlocks it. The same technology is, for instance, also used during automated airport checks. It’s the least problematic use for facial recognition, in my opinion — not least because you generally should have the possibility to opt out if you don’t feel comfortable with it.

2 — To identify someone, for example in a crowd: That’s the second use of the technology, where things get murkier. In this scenario, facial recognition is used to scan whole groups of people to find individuals. All of their biometric data is compared to thousands or millions of others in databases to find matches. Such technology has become more effective in recent years. But it’s still far from perfect — which didn’t stop a football stadium on the outskirts of Danish capital Copenhagen, for example, to start deploying it earlier this year to catch fans who have been banned. Legally and ethically, it raises more questions than the first use case.

3 — To analyze your behavior: And then there’s “affect recognition,” the third use case, which I mentioned above. It takes facial recognition one step further: The technology scans your face and other parts of your body, or it analyzes your voice, not (just) to identify you but also to draw inferences about some of your most innermost feelings.

Such “emotion detection” technology, as it’s true for all AI, has the potential to do good, for example when doctors use it to scan the faces of ill toddlers to determine their level of pain, or when it’s used to warn drivers that they’re about to fall asleep.

But in some Chinese classrooms, cameras now continuously scan the faces of students to collect real-time data on whether their expressions look scared, happy, disgusted or sad. And companies around the world have begun using systems that scan candidates’ facial expressions during job interview to determine their potential success rate if they were hired.

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