(Newswire.net — April 26, 2021) — Today, cameras are everywhere. They are in stores and malls, on trains and at airports, and even shoved in our face via a smartphone. Images and video captured on camera and stored in data banks across the world are critical pieces of data that provide information about nearly anyone on earth. It is for this reason that biometric facial recognition software has been utilized by everyone from governments to retailers.
While the ethics of capturing everyone on video without explicit consent is up to personal interpretation, the fact remains that using biometric facial recognition software has fundamentally changed the game on how we live and do business. Here’s how.
A New Way Of Shopping
If you’ve ever seen the hit movie Minority Report, you may be familiar with the concept of personalized advertising. If you haven’t, you’ve likely experienced it for yourself while using social media.
Today, advertisers and retailers are able to use your data to personalize the ads and products that are suggested to you on the internet. But what about at retail stores?
Major stores that have membership programs where your information is logged into a data bank utilize biometric facial recognition to track your shopping behaviors in-store. Your movements around the store, which products you interact with, and how long you spend in the store are all measured, tracked, stored, and later used.
Among the ways these data are used in creating personalized advertisements based on your in-store behavior. Similarly, your data will also be used to optimize the in-store experience for you and other customers. To compete with the convenience of online shopping, offline stores need to make your shopping experience just as convenient.
Safety is a Priority
With terrorism and health scares at an all-time high, managers of public places have countless reasons to want to use biometric facial recognition software to monitor visitors. Advanced artificial intelligence software can use biometric facial recognition to monitor visitors to public spaces and alert authorities of any suspicious activity.
Similarly, this technology is used in investigations for crimes as well as for the general upkeep of public safety. Private companies even use this technology to track their employees.
Image Recall
Since all of these images and videos are stored in servers or in the cloud, computers can use biometric facial recognition to comb through archives and find matches. This doesn’t always have to be performed for sinister purposes or for assurances of public safety. In fact, it can even be for innocuous purposes.
Consider a search engine like Google. Each day, millions of users search Google images for people, mostly for celebrities or other notable people. Since Google crawls the internet for matches for the user’s query, they use biometric facial recognition to find images that may not have been properly tagged or labeled.
Similarly, media companies, sports franchises, and other enterprises that take many photos and videos can use biometric facial recognition tech to pull photos and videos from their archives that also may not have been properly tagged.