Behind the face recognition case in Tianjin, don’t compromise with the convenience of technology
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Facial information is unique, immutable and easy to obtain, which not only brings value to face recognition technology, but also brings risks to face recognition.
A property company in Tianjin was sued by residents for using face recognition as the only way to verify access to and from the community. The court of first instance held that the relevant evidence could not prove that the defendant violated his right to privacy. Recently, the second instance of the case changed the verdict. The court asked the property company to delete the plaintiff's face information and provide him with other ways to verify his access to the community .
In fact, since the rapid commercialization of face recognition, people have been passively trapped in face recognition. Fortunately, people are constantly trying to get out of this dilemma-the abuse of "face recognition" is gradually being taken seriously.
Revisiting the Risks of Face Recognition
People have always known about the risks of facial recognition. A 2019 survey by the Ada Lovelace Institute found that 55 percent of respondents wanted the government to limit police use of the technology. Respondents are also uneasy about its commercial use, with only 17% wanting to see facial recognition technology used for age verification in supermarkets, 7% in favor of using it to track customers, and 4% saying it would be used for It is appropriate for screening job applicants.
From a legal point of view, face information is a typical "biometric information", which is also a consensus at home and abroad, and biometric information contains two important characteristics.
First of all, biometric information is relatively sensitive information, and this sensitivity is embodied in that it is closely related to the basic rights and freedoms of individuals. At the most superficial level, if our biological information is obtained by others, others may use our face combined with ID card information to log in to our bank account, transfer the property in the account, and enter the unit we should have entered. community.
These risks are also the risks most relevant to the daily life of residents. The resulting side effects are mainly reflected in two aspects. On the one hand, the law says that without privacy, there is no freedom. If all our privacy is in the hands of others, no matter who controls your privacy, if it forms a pull-net-style splicing, then all individuals have a day activities will be controlled. On the other hand, it is discrimination, which may form discrimination against specific groups. For example, some groups with special biological characteristics may become the focus of face recognition, which constitutes an infringement of the basic rights of specific groups and also causes social exclusion. The problem.
Second, biometric information, unlike other personal information, is almost permanently irreplaceable. This means that biometric information such as faces and fingerprints, once leaked, cannot be changed and cannot be remedied, and we may be exposed to such risks forever. Therefore, once the information is leaked or illegally stolen, it will cause great harm to the personal and property safety of individuals .
And, compared with fingerprints, the risk of face information is more prominent, because face recognition is non-contact. If we want to obtain our fingerprint, we can still know, and after the fingerprint is leaked, others cannot confirm the subject of the fingerprint; but after the face is leaked, the subject of the face can be quickly locked. A professor at Tsinghua School of Journalism mentioned in an interview with China News Weekly that we have 500 opportunities to be photographed by cameras every day. However, we have no idea how many of these cameras have face recognition capabilities or collect data about our faces.
Further, if our face information is leaked, it will be quite difficult if we want to remedy it through civil law . Civil law pays attention to "whoever claims will give evidence". Faced with the collection of so many places, we neither know who collected it, nor where it leaked from, let alone who leaked or abused it.
Not only that, it is not so easy to take the path of administrative law or criminal law protection. Only a large-scale data breach can prompt the public security organs to initiate investigation activities . However, even if the public security organs catch the criminals, our information will still be leaked. As mentioned earlier, the leakage of this kind of biological information basically means that there is no way to restore the original state.
In fact, data breaches have occurred frequently in recent years. For example, in 2019, the Deepnet Vision Company (whose main business is face recognition, AI and security) was exposed to a large-scale data breach, resulting in unrestricted access to the personal information of 2.56 million people. In 2020, American facial recognition company Clearvies AI, which has more than 3 billion portrait photos, said its entire client list had been stolen. If a large amount of collected data is not protected by passwords, once it is maliciously used by criminals, the information security of citizens will be greatly endangered, and some black and gray products will benefit from it .
Trade privacy for convenience
In fact, in recent years, the entire mainstream public opinion has turned to the protection of personal information, and some mainstream media have begun to report the potential risks of "face recognition", but under the logic of "exchanging privacy for convenience", most of the People don't care more.
Data released by research firm Gen Market Insights shows that the global face recognition equipment market value will grow at a rate of 26.8% between 2018 and 2025, reaching $7.17 billion by the end of 2025. China is the largest consumption area of face recognition equipment, accounting for 44.59% of the world in 2023, with a compound annual growth rate of 29.53% in 2018-2023 .
Especially with the outbreak of the epidemic, we need to use face recognition to authenticate the health code, hand over our trajectory, and surrender our personal information. Had to do this in order to maintain a normal life. The impact of the epidemic on the whole society is too great, and more people are beginning to accept this state. Behind the rapid growth of face recognition applications is people's indulgence for the convenience of technology .
Since face recognition is a non-contact recognition technology, it is convenient and fast to operate and has low cost of promotion. Therefore, there are more and more application scenarios of face recognition - it is used for entering and exiting subway security checks, it is installed in classrooms to monitor students' attention, It has even been installed in public toilets in Tiantan Park to prevent "paper thieves". Now, many places that need to verify identity, such as community access control, work attendance, etc., require face recognition. Some are for administrative convenience and some are for commercial use.
At present, almost any organization can promote face recognition. Among them, technology companies are the most motivated. They can sell equipment and charge fees for follow-up maintenance. The promotion of face recognition will drive the development of this industry. In addition, security-related institutions or industries can also promote face recognition to maintain public order, which will make the management of floating population easier, such as residential properties.
But in fact, people have not reached a consensus on the ethical issues of face recognition, and the scope of application of face recognition is not clear. Therefore, for the sense of security and convenience brought by video surveillance and face recognition, more people choose to compromise. Of course, the fundamental reason behind this is that the disclosure of information is insufficient and incomplete, and the corresponding risks are not informed enough, so that people mistakenly believe that there are only benefits and no risks or little risks .
If the main user of face recognition can inform the corresponding risks, people may not necessarily like to trade privacy for security for convenience. As long as the relevant companies can truthfully disclose the risks involved, people will immediately realize that privacy should not be traded for convenience, which is likely to be making a deal with the devil.
When the information received is insufficient and incomplete, people will of course pay more attention to the immediate interests, because there is no clear institution or subject using face recognition to tell people the risks and how this matter may be. In what direction.
Just as the residential property is also promoting face recognition, it has no motivation and financial resources to upgrade the system and maintain data security. And this is also the most terrifying part of face recognition applications - security issues have a short-board effect. The characteristic of the Internet age is that the problem will not lie in the place with the highest level of security, but in the place with the lowest level and the worst ability. Collecting information from multiple organizations and centers is more risky than collecting information from a single center.
what ordinary people can do
Of course, it's not all bad news. A visible phenomenon is that nowadays, more and more people have or are aware of the problem of face recognition, and the resulting worries are driving the application of face recognition. Compliance, or at least not an "abuse" situation.
In April 2019, Guo Bing, a specially-appointed associate professor of Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, set up an annual card worth 1,000 yuan in Hangzhou Wildlife World. With this card and fingerprints, Guo Bing and his family can swim unlimited times a year. But on October 17, he received a text message from Wildlife World, "From now on, users who have not registered face recognition will not be able to enter the park normally." Guo Bing, on the grounds that he violated the "Consumer Rights Protection Law" Take Hangzhou Wildlife World to court.
On November 20, 2020, Hangzhou Fuyang Court made a first-instance judgment, ordering Wildlife World to compensate for the economic losses caused by unilaterally changing the contract and delete Guo Bing's personal information. The "butterfly wings" of people's reflections on face recognition technology .
In addition, more and more news about the abuse of face recognition has appeared in the newspapers, especially in a scene like a community, since the property has no intrinsic motivation to implement it, if there are residents who object and inform the existence of legal risks, the property may give up. . This is also the reason why face recognition has not continued to be implemented in some communities.
For example, in the recent Tianjin face recognition case, Gu lived in Chengji Economic and Trade Center, Heping District, Tianjin, and the property company of the community adopted face recognition as the verification method for entering and leaving the community.
The judgment shows that from August 2 to 5, 2021, Gu communicated with the staff of the Chengji Economic and Trade Center Project Department of the Tianjin Branch of Lanzhou Chengguan Property Service Group Co., Ltd., asking to delete his face information and provide him with Barrier-free access to the community, but the property company rejected Gu's request. After that, Gu entrusted a law firm to issue a lawyer's letter to Chengguan Tianjin Company, making the same request. After the latter signed the lawyer's letter, he did not contact Gu or his agent.
In September 2021, Gu sued Lanzhou Chengguan Property Service Group Co., Ltd. and Chengguan Tianjin Company to court. The cause of the first instance of the case was determined by the court as a privacy dispute. According to Article 64 of the Civil Procedure Law, "The parties have the responsibility to provide evidence for their claims", the court of first instance held that the plaintiff Gu did not submit the information related to the disclosure, tampering or loss of the defendant's information. evidence, and the relevant evidence provided cannot prove that the two defendants violated their privacy rights. Therefore, the plaintiff's claims have no factual and legal basis and are not supported, and all claims are dismissed.
Gu refused to accept the first-instance judgment and later appealed to the Tianjin No. 1 Intermediate People's Court. The appellant believes that the main legal issue in this case is the protection of personal information rather than the right to privacy. It did not claim that personal information was leaked, tampered with, or lost, and there was no need to provide relevant evidence. The court of first instance was wrong in its determination of the burden of proof. The second-instance court confirmed the facts identified by the first-instance court, and held that the case was a dispute over the handling of personal information, and the cause of action should be determined to be a dispute over the protection of personal information.
The court of second instance pointed out that according to Article 10 of the "Supreme People's Court Regulations on Several Issues concerning the Application of Law in the Trial of Civil Cases Related to the Processing of Personal Information Using Face Recognition Technology", which will be implemented from August 1, 2021, if there is a property owner or property user If you do not agree to adopt the above verification methods and request the property management company to provide other reasonable verification methods, the property management company cannot refuse it on the grounds of intelligent management.
The court of second instance held that although Gu agreed with Chengguan Tianjin Company to extract his face information as a way of verification when he checked in, he later raised objections to Chengguan Tianjin Company's extraction of his face information as the only way of verification. Chengguan Tianjin Company's use of face recognition verification was the reason for the owners' committee's agreement to refuse to provide Gu with other verification methods, which was contrary to the aforementioned provisions. Chengguan Tianjin Company's claim that the use of face recognition verification method is in accordance with the relevant regulations and requirements of epidemic prevention and control, and there is no evidence to prove it.
In the end, the court of second instance revoked the first-instance judgment and asked Chengguan Tianjin Company to delete Gu's face information, provide other access verification methods, and compensate a reasonable fee of 6,200 yuan.
Obviously, what people do is effective in the end, including making their own voices, so as to form a synergy in public opinion and society . This synergy could help counteract the misuse of facial recognition technology and could change legislation and corresponding decision-making. This is why the Civil Code additionally stipulates the right to personal information in addition to the right to privacy. Anonymity is the basis for the operation of modern society. We cannot regard efficiency as a higher efficiency provided by face recognition technology. A new view of justice.