NIAS Fellowship for research into public resistance to facial recognition

Professor of Critical Data Studies Stefania Milan has received a fellowship grant from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW) to conduct research on how citizens resist the implementation of facial recognition technology in society. The grant will allow Milan to fully concentrate on this research during the academic year 2022-2023 Automated facial recognition technology is creeping into public spaces. It is implemented in airports to speed up boarding, in everyday policing to automatically identify lawbreakers, in public schools to facilitate internal payments and track student emotions. Despite the galvanizing narratives associated with this form of biometrics, however, critical voices are on the rise. Facial recognition technology "might be the world's most divisive technology," argued The New York Times. It is "arsenic in the water supply of democracy," denounced the UK civil liberties group Liberty . Low accuracy, lack of transparency of the underlying software, lack of democratic oversight and the potential overreach of this intrusive form of data collection are just some of the issues surrounding the technology.