The question of who owns your face sounds absurd on the surface – of course you own it, it’s attached to your body after all. But in an era of facial recognition technology, in which your face can be scanned and added to databases without your knowledge or consent, the answer to that question gets a lot more complicated. Your unique composition of features might already be included in a collection used by data brokers, the government, police and advertising and tech companies to tag you in photos, match you to alleged criminal activity, sell information about you or teach neural networks how to refine facial recognition technology itself.

In fact, we have the internet and its databank of faces to thank for reaching this point. Millions upon millions of faces are now available for the scraping, which would have been difficult or impossible to achieve any other way. Computer scientists feed these images to artificial intelligence to “train” them how to recognize faces, and advances in graphics processing allow the machines to sort through them at a whiplash pace. Very little human input is needed as the neural networks use their own algorithms to decide which similarities and differences between the faces are significant, making the whole thing a bit of a mystery.

Many of us willingly make our faces available simply by using social media, lured in by apps like Snapchat and Instagram that map our features in order to apply cute filters and perform other tricks, or just by having photos of ourselves appear on the web. The convenience of features like Apple’s Face ID, which uses facial recognition to log in and pay for transactions, can also be hard to resist. But if you think avoiding the latest iPhones and apps will keep you out of these databases, you’re fooling yourself.

Surreptitious Scanning

At least 40 million surveillance cameras shoot billions of hours of footage a week in the United States alone, according to 2014 estimates. Many cities hope to fight crime by installing them in parks, intersections and sidewalks, often working in conjunction with the ones that peer out from private properties, and some are police-operated. Cities like New York, Washington, Chicago, Orlando and Los Angeles aren’t even required by law to reveal the extent of surveillance or how it’s used, and there are no enforceable rules to limit invasions of privacy or protect against abuse of surveillance systems.

Some of the cameras are equipped with real-time facial recognition technology, which can even identify moving targets. Plus, airports around the world are beginning to integrate facial recognition technology into the check-in process as well as their general surveillance systems, so you could be recognized before you even walk through the doors. You might even be scanned while attending a Taylor Swift concert as the singer’s security team searches the crowd for stalkers.

All of this means our faces can easily be recorded without our knowledge and used for remote surveillance, checked against databases of driver’s license photos and mugshots as well as photographs taken from the internet that can be tied to social media accounts, website profiles or other identifying information. Some people may learn this and think to themselves, “well, I’m not doing anything wrong, so it doesn’t affect me.” Unfortunately, that’s not necessarily true.

The Problem of False Positives

Amazon is one of the primary tech giants playing with facial recognition technology in disturbing ways, including pitching its Rekognition software to officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and filing a patent that would use doorbell cameras to document and identify people considered to be “suspicious.” How, exactly, they determine who belongs in this database is unclear, but it looks like it would at least partially be user-submitted. Let’s say you move into a new home and knock on a neighbor’s door to introduce yourself. If they have a doorbell camera, they can record your face, realize they don’t know you and sort you into the “suspicious” file, which might be shared with the entire neighborhood and Amazon at large. But algorithms also play a role, and like humans, they’re often wrong.

First of all, complete strangers can look like twins, or at least similar enough for AI to flag one in place of another. But even more troubling is the fact that facial recognition algorithms struggle to distinguish faces with dark skin. In fact, in a test by the ACLU, Amazon’s Rekognition program falsely matched 28 members of Congress with mugshots, including a disproportionate number of members of the Congressional Black Caucus. A recent MIT study also found that AI had much more trouble identifying black women than white men. It’s not hard to imagine what would happen if the software is integrated into police body cams, giving officers false “evidence” that the people before them are criminals. By the way, Rekognition is currently publicly available and wildly cheap; the ACLU test cost them just $12.33.

Your Face Can Be Hacked

When Apple debuted its Face ID for the iPhone X, the company claimed that the chance a random person could unlock your protected device is just one in a million (compared to one in 50,000 for its previous fingerprint-based Touch ID technology.) The feature projects over 30,000 invisible dots on your face to create a detailed facial map and stores that data in a “Secure Enclave” within the phone. Apple also said there’s no printed photo, video of a face or high end mask that could possibly beat the system. It was wrong. Vietnamese security firm Bkaev cracked Face ID with composite masks made of 3D-printed plastic, silicone, makeup and paper cutouts. Meanwhile, Forbes managed to break into four different Android phones using a 3D-printed head.

Far beyond simply gaining access to your devices, hackers can steal your entire face and use it for all sorts of nefarious purposes, and not just by producing a 3D-printed mask of your countenance and wearing it while committing crimes. It’s astonishingly easy to use readily available software to impersonate other people, creating convincing videos that aren’t quite what they seem. The implications of fakes like the Barack Obama video above are clear, and as the technology is refined, they could grow increasingly difficult to spot.

Maybe these “deep fakes” are funny when it’s just Nicolas Cage grafted onto the bodies of other actors in dozens of movies, but ordinary women whose faces are stolen and and used to create deceptively real-looking porn videos don’t find it so humorous. Such videos can be used to humiliate, defame and target women for abuse, whether for the creator’s own pleasure or as a form of revenge porn. So far, victims have no legal recourse; experts say deepfakes are too untraceable to investigate and exist in a legal grey area, meaning they could be protected as free speech.

There’s No Going Back Now

Facial recognition technology isn’t conceptual, theoretical or far off into the future. It’s here to stay. In China, it has already become deeply rooted in government schemes to control the populace. Two hundred million public surveillance cameras aim for an omnipresent, fully networked and fully controllable nationwide system of facial recognition working in conjunction with cell phone signals and digital financial transactions by 2020 to track citizens’ every move. By the time it’s implemented, it will also include the nation’s mandatory “social credit” ratings, which use information like how people spend their time, what they buy and the company they keep to determine whether they’re worthy of jobs, housing, travel or simply free movement. Other countries will surely follow their example, and many are well on their way.

Even people involved in creating facial recognition technology are sounding the alarms. Brian Brackeen, CEO of the firm Kairos, wants tech firms to join together to keep the technology out of the hands of law enforcement. “Time is winding down but it’s not too late for someone to take a stand and keep this from happening,” he says.

In December 2018, Microsoft urged Congress to write laws for its own facial recognition software in the year ahead, profiting from the controversial technology even as it advocates for regulation.

“We have turned down deals because we worry that the technology would be used in ways that would actually put people’s rights at risk,” said Microsoft president Brad Smith in a speech at the Brookings Institution.

As facial recognition technology continues to evolve, so will public perception around it. Have your feelings changed after learning about how it can be used?

If you’re feeling nervous already and wish you could just be invisible, check out how these 15 anti-surveillance gadgets and wearables.

We seem to have reached a new era of human civilization in which people marvel over the lack of privacy to be found in a completely transparent glass house while also revealing every last intimate detail of our lives to strangers over the internet. We tend to think of loss of privacy in terms of invasion, but just as often we’re inviting the eyes of strangers in. How are our ideas of privacy evolving, and what does it mean for the housing of the future? Will we live in increasingly closed-off quarters while even more of our details are exposed, or will we embrace a new kind of ‘radical transparency?’

Traditionally, glass houses have been a luxury. Structural glazing isn’t cheap, and if the housing isn’t designed with passive heating and cooling in mind, a whole lot of climate control can be required. The first people known to use glass for windows were wealthy Romans around the first century A.D. (and everyone else still just used oiled cloth or parchment.) In a recent New Yorker humor essay, writer Sarah Hutto plays on the old “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” adage with statements like “those in glass houses shouldn’t have kids. Those in glass houses probably have some kind of special insurance. Those in glass houses – we get it. You’re rich.”

Prior to the mid-20th century, structures made mostly of glass were almost certainly used as greenhouses, orangeries or conservatories, whether freestanding or tacked on to a more conventional building. The Farnsworth House designed and built by Mies van der Rose between 1945 and 1951 was meant for use as a holiday getaway for Edith Farnsworth, M.D., a place where she could play the violin and take in the nature of the setting.

Architect Philip Johnson famously built himself the Glass House, now a historic house museum in New Canaan, Connecticut, for his own use. Since then, glass housing has ranged from luxury homes that are opaque to the street and open to a view to examples that are more sculptural in nature, and not so much for full-time residency, like the Glass Cube House by Carlo Santambrogio.

It’s not like wealthy people aren’t concerned about their privacy. The ability to indulge in a glass house typically has more to do with the luxury of a remote location, where passersby are practically nonexistent (though you don’t often see poorer rural people living in houses made almost entirely of windows.) These houses seem to be built in the hope that their surrounding environments will stay the same, forever – or perhaps the knowledge that if other houses pop up around them, they’ll be able to change the design or raze it and start over.

Intriguingly, glass houses in urban areas are becoming more common, too, perhaps pointing to the genesis of a larger trend. Sou Fujimoto’s House NA may look like some kind of experiment, but it was designed for a young couple in Tokyo as a dramatic contrast to the concrete block homes that surround it, with interior platforms arranged like the branches of a tree. Passersby are an inevitability here. At the snakelike S House by Yuusuke Karasawa, privacy can only be found in upper layers, underground areas and behind limited walls.

But let’s be honest with ourselves: whether we live in one of these places or in a house with no windows at all, does it matter? The arrival of smart devices and the Internet of Things lets hackers peer into our homes with absurd ease. Cameras are everywhere. Facial recognition technology grows increasingly terrifying. Data breaches constantly expose our data. The Cambridge Analytica leak revealed that secretive organizations hold profiles with 5,000 data points on 220 million Americans. What do they know about you?

Perhaps the lesson in all of this is just that we all need to draw a whole lot of curtains, literally and metaphorically. In past decades, George Orwell’s seminal novel 1984 helped cultivate a healthy distrust of surveillance, but the gradual erosion of our privacy in recent years has led more and more people to shrug and go about business as usual. Exactly how all of this will affect the way we live in the near future remains to be seen, but it looks like we’ll find out soon enough.

Not so long ago, we made horror movies about invasive technology that was theoretical at the time, like RoboCop, Christine, Demon Seed and Videodrome. The 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report seemed far-out at the time, but accurately predicted a lot of today’s tech – and its drawbacks. Yet in 2017, most of us shrug our shoulders at surveillance and data mining, because if we aren’t committing crimes, who cares about our inconsequential little lives? Technology has a lot to offer humanity – including the potential to save us from ourselves – but as each new advancement becomes mundane, what are we giving up in return? Indulge your inner conspiracy theorist, if you will, and take a moment to examine how things like insect-sized drones, robotic police and even smart beds can go wrong.

Insect Drones Bug Your Home

Theoretically, bee drones could prolong the future of humanity after we’ve killed off real bees, continuing to pollinate the crops we rely on for survival. That’s definitely a plus. This ‘Plan Bee’ design is just one of several prototypes recently proposed to deal with the problem we’ve created, detecting flowers using ultraviolet light. It’s a great – and sad – idea, but do we really want to grow accustomed to insect-sized drones buzzing around in the air? Engineers have already produced tiny robotic bugs, like these produced by the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, added cameras to them, and sold them to the government for testing. They’re small enough to fly through open windows, and it’s not too far-fetched to imagine them becoming advanced enough to pass as real insects while in flight.

Facial Recognition Smart Phone Apps

A new facial recognition app called NameTag lets you surreptitiously scan your date’s face (just pretend like you’re checking a text and hold your phone between you while seated at a table) and compare it with dating and social media profiles on sites like OkCupid, Facebook and LinkedIn. The value in this is supposed to be in knowing exactly who you’re interacting with and instantly discover what you have in common. NameTag will also scan sex offender registries. It’s undeniably Black Mirror-esque (season 3, episode 1, anyone?), enabling random strangers to do the kind of background checks that employers already perform. It’s a stalker’s dream.

Real Life RoboCop

Imagine this five-foot-tall, 300-pound robot silently zooming toward you in a dark parking garage, fixing its camera lens eye on your face. The K5 Security Robot by Knightscope is designed to detect anomalous behavior, like someone walking through a closed building at night. This particular design uses sensors, cameras and navigation equipment to notify a remote security center of potential threats. If bots like these became widespread, how long would it be before they’re equipped with facial recognition software and even weapons like tasers? Check out the K5’s ominous website.

Smart TV Surveillance

Yes, your laptop camera can be hacked and remotely activated without you knowing. Wikileaks recently revealed that the CIA remotely turns on cameras and microphones on all kinds of devices to spy on citizens. It’s not just a theory, it’s happening. For example, a tool called ‘Weeping Angel’ exploits a technological loophole in Samsung Smart TVs to place the target television in ‘fake-off’ mode, recording conversations in the room and sending them to a covert CIA server via wifi. Do you really think the agency is only targeting suspected terrorists who just happen to own a Samsung? (FYI, if you own one yourself, here’s how to disable the feature that allows your TV to listen to you.)

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Rip Privacy 12 Tech Innovations That Are Actually Pretty Creepy

Nothing says ‘don’t talk to me’ like a soundproof helmet, a cocoon-shaped desk or a chair that basically swallows you when you want to disappear. Designed for introverts and people who just want some dang peace and quiet in a noisy open-plan office, these furniture designs and wearables offer hiding places for the busiest and least private of environments, like airplanes, coffee shops, hostels and even city sidewalks.

Tunnel Chair & Bed by Noga Berman

Can you find privacy within existing furniture? Designer Noga Berman has come up with a way to incorporate ‘hiding places’ into relatively ordinary-looking functional furniture pieces, including a chair and a sofa. Wrapping elastic bands around the frames creates ‘tunnels’ within the furniture that you can hide part or all of your body inside.

Brody Desk by Steelcase

This desk by workplace furniture manufacturer Steelcase feels enclosed yet open at the same time, with a design that offers some privacy and minimizes distractions without cutting you off from the entire office. It might look like tight quarters in there – and it is – but the design is intended as a sort of break from your regular desk, for periods of time when intense focus is required.

Privacy Pop Bed Tent

Worried about privacy while traveling, or stuck in a dorm room with several roommates? The ‘Privacy Pop’ bed tent may not offer much in the looks department, but it’s highly practical, offering a room-with-a-room that sets up in minutes and blocks out light.

Desk Chair Hoodies by Bernotat & Co

‘Chair Wear’ is a series of textile chair add-ons by Bernotat & Co that bring a little extra functionality, like pockets, without requiring an additional piece of furniture. The ‘Hoodini’ has an oversized hood that you can put over your head while reading or talking on the phone.

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Made For Introverts 13 Furniture Designs Wearables That Prioritize Privacy

Visitors to the new panoramic rooftop deck of the Tate Modern are being told not to take pictures … and not just of artwork on display inside the galleries: voyeuristic snapshots inside neighboring apartments are now off-limits as well.

The neighborhood Neo Bankside apartments have threatened to sue the institution over this addition, an extension to the Tate designed by Herzog & de Meuron that opened earlier this summer. The problem: people are shooting zoomed-in photographs from the viewing platform then posting them online, exposing living rooms and bedrooms behind floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall glass facades.

London politician Adele Morris calls it a “tricky situation” and notes that “residents were very distressed to suddenly discover they had no privacy at all in their homes. Nobody had anticipated that people would literally be hanging over the balcony and taking photographs of their rooms and then posting them on the internet.”

Architectural responsibility aside, solutions have been proposed to the situation. For the Tate, ideas like closing the deck or installing a screen of plants on it have been considered. On the Neo side, a film could be applied to the glass to deflect gawkers.

One resident described the experience as “terribly intrusive” and said “I bought this apartment because of the view but now I have to keep my blinds down whenever the platform is open, otherwise you get people waving at you.If I had known what it would be like, I would never have bought a flat here. Now I think I would struggle to sell it.”

Of course, there is arguably a ‘buyer beware’ component to this fiasco – living in an urban condo with extensive glass (particularly in a vertically-growing city like London) means making certain concessions to privacy. Those who live in glass houses may need to be aware of the risks they are taking – having a room with a view means that people can probably view you, too. Meanwhile, the Tate defends the design.

“The viewing level is an intrinsic part of the free public offer of the new building, providing a 360-degree experience that is virtually unique to London,” said representatives of the museum in a statement. Realistically, if someone can sue over viewers in this case and place, it also opens the door to lawsuits between basically any set of urban buildings.

“Since the very first plans were drawn up in 2006 we have been through an extensive consultation and planning process, and have maintained an ongoing dialogue with local residents. At no point during this process were any concerns raised regarding the viewing platform. There is signage encouraging the public and visitors to use it respectfully and responsibly” (Instagram images by refik, ellarog and karen_1605).