How facial recognition works in your device and is it safe?

‘Is this you?’ The Facebook algorithm ventured to ask my friend the other day, once again showing her a photo of her sister, elder to her by five years — the duo look startlingly similar, but not identical. Most recently, the massive appeal of Wireless Lab’s FaceApp, an application that showed strangely accurate representations of how you might look 50 years down the line, raised the debate around facial recognition again. “Billions of people are handing over their facial data to one company!” “Pshhh, they have all that data already, so what’s the point now!” are the opposing points of view thrown around across the privacy debate wall. But while India’s netizens were discussing this, the National Crime Records Bureau has proposed that a centralised Automated Facial Recognition System be created. The anatomy of it all What Facial Recognition technology essentially does is to “read” the geometry of your face and its biometrics: the distance between your eyes, between your forehead and chin, between your ears.