【经济学人】无处藏身：机器能从人脸辨出什么 [英国媒体]

Nowhere to hide：What machines can tell from your face

无处藏身：机器能从人脸辨出什么

Life in the age of facial recognition

人脸识别时代的生活



THE human face is a remarkable piece of work. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognise each other and is crucial to the formation of complex societies. So is the face’s ability to send emotional signals, whether through an involuntary blush or the artifice of a false smile. People spend much of their waking lives, in the office and the courtroom as well as the bar and the bedroom, reading faces, for signs of attraction, hostility, trust and deceit. They also spend plenty of time trying to dissimulate.

人脸是非凡的杰作，惊人丰富的面部特征帮助人们相互识别，对复杂社会的形成至关重要。无论情不自禁的脸红，还是惺惺作态的假笑，人脸传达情感信号的能力亦是如此。无论在办公室、法庭，还是酒吧、卧室，人类在清醒时花大量时间解读脸部信号：吸引、敌意、信任、欺骗，也花大量时间试图掩饰这些信号。

Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces. In America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers’ attendance; in Britain, by retailers to spot past shoplifters. This year Welsh police used it to arrest a suspect outside a football game. In China it verifies the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple’s new iPhone is expected to use it to unlock the homescreen (see article).

科技在迅速赶上人类察言观色的能力。美国教堂利用人脸识别记录祷告者的出席情况；英国零售商利用人脸识别发现有前科的扒手。今年，威尔士警方靠人脸识别在足球赛场外逮捕一名嫌疑人。中国利用人脸识别确认打车司机的身份，让游客进入景点，消费者通过微笑完成支付。苹果新一代iPhone有望支持人脸识别解锁主屏幕。

Set against human skills, such applications might seem incremental. Some breakthroughs, such as flight or the internet, obviously transform human abilities; facial recognition seems merely to encode them. Although faces are peculiar to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at first sight, intrude on something that is private. And yet the ability to record, store and analyse images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale promises one day to bring about fundamental changes to notions of privacy, fairness and trust.

相比人类技能，这些用途似乎锦上添花。有些突破明显改变了人类技能，如飞行或互联网，而人脸识别只是对人类技能进行编码。虽然每个人的面部是独有的，但也是公开的，所以表面上看人脸识别并未侵犯隐私。但人脸识别能低廉、快速、大规模的记录、储存、分析人脸图像，总有一天使人类对隐私、公平、信任的定义发生根本性改变。

The final frontier

最后的边界

Start with privacy. One big difference between faces and other biometric data, such as fingerprints, is that they work at a distance. Anyone with a phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use. FindFace, an app in Russia, compares snaps of strangers with pictures on VKontakte, a social network, and can identify people with a 70% accuracy rate. Facebook’s bank of facial images cannot be scraped by others, but the Silicon Valley giant could obtain pictures of visitors to a car showroom, say, and later use facial recognition to serve them ads for cars. Even if private firms are unable to join the dots between images and identity, the state often can. China’s government keeps a record of its citizens’ faces; photographs of half of America’s adult population are stored in databases that can be used by the FBI. Law-enforcement agencies now have a powerful weapon in their ability to track criminals, but at enormous potential cost to citizens’ privacy.

首先说说隐私。相比指纹等生物特征识别数据，人脸识别的不同之处是远程使用。任何人可通过手机拍照来使用人脸识别程序。FindFace是一款俄国应用程序，将陌生人照片与社交网站VKontakte上的图片做对比，识别准确率达70%。Facebook网站的人脸图库无法被删除，但这家硅谷巨头能获取汽车展厅参观者的照片，过后用人脸识别向他们推送汽车广告。虽然私企无法关联图像与身份，但国家做得到。中国政府拥有公民脸部数据库；美国一半成年人的照片被储存在数据库供联邦调查局使用。如今，执法部门利用这一强大武器追踪罪犯，但公民隐私面临潜在的巨大代价。

The face is not just a name-tag. It displays a lot of other information—and machines can read that, too. Again, that promises benefits. Some firms are analysing faces to provide automated diagnoses of rare genetic conditions, such as Hajdu-Cheney syndrome, far earlier than would otherwise be possible. Systems that measure emotion may give autistic people a grasp of social signals they find elusive. But the technology also threatens. Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated that, when shown pictures of one gay man, and one straight man, the algorithm could attribute their sexuality correctly 81% of the time. Humans managed only 61% (see article). In countries where homosexuality is a crime, software which promises to infer sexuality from a face is an alarming prospect.

脸部不只是姓名标签，还透露出大量的其他信息，机器也能解读这些信息。这同样带来益处，有些公司通过分析脸部，自动诊断罕见遗传病，例如豪-谢综合征，使诊断时间大大提前。情绪测量系统帮助自闭症患者读懂难以理解的社交信号。但该技术也存在风险，斯坦福大学的科研人员证明，利用算法分析同性恋和异性恋者的照片，判断性取向的准确率达81%，而人类的准确率只有61%。在同性恋非法国家，利用软件分析脸部来推断性取向前景堪忧。

Keys, wallet, balaclava

钥匙、钱包、巴拉克拉法帽

Less violent forms of discrimination could also become common. Employers can already act on their prejudices to deny people a job. But facial recognition could make such bias routine, enabling firms to filter all job applications for ethnicity and signs of intelligence and sexuality. Nightclubs and sports grounds may face pressure to protect people by scanning entrants’ faces for the threat of violence—even though, owing to the nature of machine-learning, all facial-recognition systems inevitably deal in probabilities. Moreover, such systems may be biased against those who do not have white skin, since algorithms trained on data sets of mostly white faces do not work well with different ethnicities. Such biases have cropped up in automated assessments used to inform courts’ decisions about bail and sentencing.

非暴力歧视也可能变得普遍。雇主可出于偏见拒绝求职者，而人脸识别会使偏见形成惯例，企业根据种族、智商和性取向标志去筛选求职申请。夜总会和运动场通过扫描入场者脸部发现暴力威胁，在保护人员安全方面可能面临压力。但就机器学习的本质而言，所有人脸识别系统必然根据可能性进行处理。另外，这种系统可能对有色人种抱有偏见，因为算法接受的训练主要基于白人脸部数据集，对其他种族效果并不好。通知法庭保释与判决的自动化评估已出现这种偏见。

Eventually, continuous facial recording and gadgets that paint computerised data onto the real world might change the texture of social interactions. Dissembling helps grease the wheels of daily life. If your partner can spot every suppressed yawn, and your boss every grimace of irritation, marriages and working relationships will be more truthful, but less harmonious. The basis of social interactions might change, too, from a set of commitments founded on trust to calculations of risk and reward derived from the information a computer attaches to someone’s face. Relationships might become more rational, but also more transactional.

持续的记录人脸，设备将计算机化的数据用于现实世界，最终可能改变社会互动的本质。掩饰有助于生活和谐，假如每次强忍打哈欠都被伴侣发现，每次恼羞成怒都被老板发现，那么婚姻和工作关系将变得更真诚，但不那么和谐。社会互动的基础也可能发生改变，包括基于互信的承诺，根据计算机收集的人脸信息进行风险与回报评估。人际关系也许变得更理性，但更具交易性。

In democracies, at least, legislation can help alter the balance of good and bad outcomes. European regulators have embedded a set of principles in forthcoming data-protection regulation, decreeing that biometric information, which would include “faceprints”, belongs to its owner and that its use requires consent—so that, in Europe, unlike America, Facebook could not just sell ads to those car-showroom visitors. Laws against discrimination can be applied to an employer screening candidates’ images. Suppliers of commercial face-recognition systems might submit to audits, to demonstrate that their systems are not propagating bias unintentionally. Firms that use such technologies should be held accountable.

至少在民主国家，立法有助于调节好坏结果的平衡。欧洲监管机构在即将出台的数据保护管理条例中设立一系列准则，规定“脸纹”等生物特征识别信息归所有者所有，未经所有者同意不得使用。因此与美国不同，Facebook在欧洲不能向汽车展厅的参观者推送广告。反歧视法可适用筛选求职者照片的雇主。商用人脸识别系统的供应商可接受审核，证明系统并非有意传播偏见。使用人脸识别技术的企业应被追究责任。

Such rules cannot alter the direction of travel, however. Cameras will only become more common with the spread of wearable devices. Efforts to bamboozle facial-recognition systems, from sunglasses to make-up, are already being overtaken; research from the University of Cambridge shows that artificial intelligence can reconstruct the facial structures of people in disguise. Google has explicitly turned its back on matching faces to identities, for fear of its misuse by undemocratic regimes. Other tech firms seem less picky. Amazon and Microsoft are both using their cloud services to offer face recognition; it is central to Facebook’s plans. Governments will not want to forgo its benefits. Change is coming. Face up to it. 

但是，这类法规改变不了发展方向。随着便携设备的普及，摄像头只会变得更为普遍。墨镜、化妆等欺骗人脸识别系统的手段正在失效，剑桥大学研究表明人工智能可重构伪装的人脸结构。谷歌明确拒绝将人脸与身份相匹配，担心非民主政权滥用这项技术。其他科技公司则没那么挑剔，亚马逊和微软正利用云服务提供人脸识别；Facebook也将其作为企业规划的核心。政府不会放弃人脸识别带来的利益。变革即将来临，那就勇敢去面对吧。