# Ethical Debate 2 This week, we will conduct an ethical debate on the topic of facial recognition. All the activities should be done during the lab. In the following sections, we will introduce the background of facial recognition and describe the activities that you will work on in this week's lab. ## Backgroud Face recognition is used to identify people's face in photos, videos or in real-time. A well designed facial recognition software can capture, analyze and compare the patterns or features based on the person's facial details. It is commonly used in the field of biometric security, e.g., authenticate and verify the identification of people. A simple application that we use facial recognition in our daily life may be unlocking the phone using our phone cameras. Usually, face recognition works in three steps. Firstly, there is a face detection process that detects and locates the human faces in images and videos. Secondly, there is a face capture process that performs the face analysis and transforms the analog information (a face) into a set of digital information (data) based on the facial features. Lastly, it is the face match process that verifies if two faces belong to the same person. This process may compare the captured data with a database with known faces. Facial recognition can be used in harmless way, such as authenticating and verifying ID for access control, finding missing people, and searching for criminals, etc. However, there are privacy and security concerns about facial recognition. The major concern is the use of facial recognition to identify individuals without the consent. Furthermore, with the help of the cameras on mobile devices and public surveillance devices, it is easy to track a person as he/she moves around. People's privacy and identification is in a risk when facial recognition software is commonly used. ## Part 1: Individual study (45 minutes) In this part, you will work on exploring more about facial recognition technology and its applications individually. Here are a few links to the articles about facial recognition that can help you get started. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_recognition_system - https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/how-facial-recognition-works/ - https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/definitions/what-is-facial-recognition In addition to the above listed materials, you should explore more about facial recognition by searching it on google, so that you have a comprehensive understanding about it. At the end of your reading, you should be able to answer the following questions: - What is facial recognition? - What are the commonly used facial recognition applications or softwares? - How facial recognition works technically? ## Part 2: Group discussion (45 minutes) Given that facial recognition may be used in bad ways, we would like you to debate the following topic: Should facial recognition software be banned? In this part, we will ask you to form your own debate teams (with four or five persons per team). We will assign a TA for every two teams to coordinate the debate activities. As we have four TAs, we will have four parallel debate sessions. Within each session, the two teams will be randomly assigned as prop, the team that is in favor of banning the facial recognition software and the other team as op, the team against banning the facial recognition software. More specifically, you should prepare the answers for the following questions: - What do you find to be the most convincing argument in favor of banning facial recognition software? - What do you find to be the most convincing argument against banning facial recognition software? - Would you recommend a national ban on the development and use of facial recognition software? You will have 45 minutes to prepare for the debate. ## Part 3: Debate After the group discussion and preparation, we will conduct the debate with four parallel sessions. The outcome of the debate is that all of us having a more comprehensive understanding about facial recognition and the technology behind it, as well as its applications. ## Grade Point Allocations | Part | Feature | Value | |-----------|-------------------------------------------|-----| | Lab | Debate participation | 5 |