Urban Surveillance and Panopticism: will we recognize the facial recognition society?

This paper explores the implementation of facial recognition surveillance mechanisms as a reaction to perceptions of insecurity in urban spaces. Facial recognition systems are part of an attempt to reduce insecurity through knowledge and vision, but, paradoxically, their use may add to insecurity by transforming society in unanticipated directions. Facial recognition promises to bring the disciplinary power of panoptic surveillance envisioned by Bentham - and then examined by Foucault - into the contemporary urban environment. The potential of facial recognition systems – the seamless integration of linked databases of human images and the automated digital recollection of the past – will necessarily alter societal conceptions of privacy as well as the dynamics of individual and group interactions in public space. More strikingly, psychological theory linked to facial recognition technology holds the potential to breach a final frontier of surveillance, enabling attempts to read the minds of those under its gaze by analyzing the flickers of involuntary microexpressions that cross their faces and betray their emotions.