Neatly organised across seven chapters and an epilogue, Andrejevic and Selwyn’s Facial Recognition expertly documents the promises, practicalities, and perniciousness of facial recognition technologies (FRT) across contemporary Western societies. Facial Recognition is a welcome and highly accessible text that invites readers into the heart of the debates surrounding the development and application of FRT. These debates are diverse and complex, and the book masterfully provides readers with a clear understanding of the key ideas and aspects of FRT’s history (chapter one), its technological and conceptual underpinnings (chapter two), its contemporary economic and political landscape (chapter three), its pro- and anti-social applications (chapters four and five), and the potential futures awaiting us through its continued expansion and integration into everyday life (chapter six).
Throughout, real-world cases ground the discussion to better contextualise and illustrate both the growth, and normalisation, of FRT within and across Western societies. The book should be commended for its ability to weave between the technological utopianism and dystopianism that often accompanies the hyperbole of help and harms that FRT brings. At the same time, the book does a brilliant job of reminding the reader of the persistent potential of social harm and consequence that is inextricably connected to FRT and the ways in which these technologies often socially sort individuals into oppositional categories; those benefiting from promises of efficiency and convenience, contrasted with those experiencing the callousness of autonomous systems that widen and reinforce existing disparities and inequalities (p. ix).
Chapter one, “Facial Recognition: An Introduction”, excellently outlines the contours of the debates surrounding FRT and the economic and industrial scale of its development. This chapter provides a clear and condensed history spanning the formative work of the 1960s, to the normalisation and mainstreaming of the technology since 2020 across sectors through its promises of transformation, precision, and efficiency. Throughout, there is a clear highlighting of the problematic history of the technology and its relationship with the political and social climate of its inception, namely, the ways in which such systems were borne of an often-unexamined historical entanglement with matters of race and racism.
Chapter two, “Facial Recognition: Underpinning Concepts and Concerns”, continues establishing the foundations by examining the computational logics and technical challenges underpinning FRT. These include the complexities of making the human face readable by FRT, the racial biases within FRT (p. 35), and the attempts to correct such biases within training datasets (pp. 36–38). Following this, attention turns to the surveillance creep of FRT through its applications beyond its original purpose as a tool of identification to its contemporary integration within biometric recognition systems. Here the focus is on how these systems pass social judgments and essentialise the individual through purported notions of, for example, the ability to recognise the ‘face of the criminal’ (pp. 38–43). To better understand the relationship between identification and surveillance and why the face is privileged as providing essential truth about an individual the chapter then turns to surveillance theory. Here, the reader is carefully guided through how systems are conceptualised as post-panoptic forms of monitoring that govern the individual at a granular level within the physical environment (pp. 46–50); the networking of FRT to reconstruct images and knowledges beyond the confines of a single camera (pp. 51–52), and its position within wider surveillance assemblages (pp. 52–53). Consequently, the work in chapter two provides the reader with the necessary theoretical knowledge within surveillance studies as it pertains to FRT.
Following the introductory work of the first two chapters, chapter three, ‘Mapping the Facial Recognition Landscape’ gives a strong overview of the FRT ecosystem including the industrial complexes and political underpinnings of its development alongside the associated attempts to legislate and regulate FRT within the EU and US. Here emphasis is placed on the geopolitical nature of the technology and the interplay between government funding and development, applications of FRT in a variety of security and monitoring settings, and the role that big tech firms and specialist facial recognition firms play in its continuing development. The examination of the controversies surrounding the cases of Clearview AI and PimEyes help highlight the clear real-world consequences and harms that can accompany FRT applications.
Chapter four, ‘Pro-Social Applications: Facial Recognition as an Everyday ‘Good’?’, excellently presents a dispassionate account of how FRT can be understood as a technology for ‘good’. Here, examples include its use within retail environments, public space, education settings, the workplace, and for humanitarian purposes as a means of tracking and monitoring the mobilities of displaced and dispersed populations (p. 80) and assisting in the identification of victims of human trafficking (p. 81). The intention is to establish a benchmark for scenarios in which FRT provides viable, productive outcomes that require critical examination rather than reactionary demands for its automatic banning. Accompanying these pro-social examples, this chapter invites readers to critically question and challenge these pro-social notions, highlighting once more the potential harms inherent to each application.
This work is immediately carried through into chapter five ‘Problematic Applications: Facial Recognition as an Inherent Harm?’, whereby FRT uses for military, security, and policing purposes along with the embedding of the technologies into the mundanity of domestic and working environments are critically examined. Here, discussion focusses on problems including misidentification, system fallibility, erosions of privacy, unnecessary intrusions into daily life particularly among the most vulnerable within society, and the technical shortcomings of systems that lead to the exacerbation and entrenching of biases, with a specific focus on racial biases.
Furthermore, there is a refutation of the techno- and data-solutionist notion that such shortcomings and biases can be remedied through technical solutions. Of particular significance here is the distinction between statistical bias and social harms (p. 134) and the different conceptual languages deployed by computer and social scientists in understanding the challenges associated with both. To this end, the book advocates for the recognition that FRT and algorithmic harms are themselves a “socio-technical problem of humans and data … and therefore not something that can ever be ‘fixed’” (p. 135). The authors rally against the notion that these technologies can produce objective and neutral accounts of social reality for such an outcome is impossible given the socio-technical nature of their creation.
Equipped with a comprehension of the harms, difficulties, and allure of FRT from the preceding chapters, chapter six ‘Facial Futures: Emerging Promises and Possible Perils’ invites readers to imagine a range of prospective surveillance futures in which the proliferation of FRT continues unabated. Here a spectrum of possibility is explored. This begins with an extreme scenario whereby faces have become metadata in a totalising surveillance society predicated on pure personalisation and convenience through systems that socially sort populations into deserving/undeserving and desirable/undesirable. Away from imaginaries of totalising systems, the chapter also explores how FRT could realistically be applied in more focused and bounded contexts of verification, identification, and inference. The success of this chapter lay in its grounding in contemporary FRT realities. As such, there is a consistent core to each outlined future that ensures the chapter does not over-extend itself when discussing the prospective social realities, consequences, and harms that accompany such futures.
The final chapter, ‘Making Critical Sense of Facial Recognition and Society’ brings the arguments of the book together and offers concluding remarks. Here the material is organised around the authors ambitions of maintaining a frank and transparent dialogue across society on the appropriate development and application of FRT. The significant challenges and harms raised throughout the previous six chapters are all dealt with in turn to serve as a starting point for such dialogue; that of the fallibility of FRT; the challenge of finding purely ‘good’ use cases; the experiences of harms of FRT against the marginalised and vulnerable within society and how this is especially experienced along racialised lines; the perceived neutrality and objectivity of FRT; and the prospective ways in which social life and reality is altered by certain surveillance futures. An epilogue ‘Facial Recognition – So Where Now’ closely follows the concluding chapter and presents three possibilities for how the debate surrounding the position and purpose of FRT within society could take shape; ‘the path of least resistance’ (p. 182); ‘complete prohibition’ (p. 184); and ‘strong and open scrutiny’ (p. 186).
In line with the books ambitions of creating dialogue between those involved with, and concerned by, the development and application of FRT, this book will be of interest to a wide audience spanning the social and computational sciences. The book provides a detailed, well-evidenced and argued account of the contemporary landscape of FRT that demands its readers to confront their knowledges and presumptions of FRT to better critique the technology. For those well versed in matters of surveillance the book provides a welcome reminder of the broad contours of the debates surrounding the technology, for those unfamiliar with the field this book is an excellent introduction, ensuring readers are equipped with a critical understanding of the key social, political, and economic challenges and harms that the proliferation and normalisation of these technologies represent.