INTRODUCTION

Clare Garvie's Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology 2019 report ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’ begins by detailing the problematic use of celebrity headshots as ‘probe images’ within law enforcement use of facial recognition technologies (FRTs): after unsuccessfully processing grainy footage through their FRT, the New York Police Department officers noticed that the suspect resembled movie star Woody Harrelson; they then used Google image search results of Harrelson within their FRT to identify their shoplifting suspect. This practice is not uncommon as the report also recounts prior incidents where photos of famous basketball players were utilised in a similar manner. Within these instances, the famous faces’ public circulation, combined with the recognisability of celebrities’ faces, made the images of the celebrities’ faces useful strategic materials within the apparatus of FRT.

The examples outlined by Garvie are a reminder that famous faces have been central to the development, application and improvement of FRT from the beginnings of its history. Under the theme of ‘Progress and Harmony for Mankind’, the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, Japan and the Nippon Electric Company (NEC) Pavilion hosted a piece titled ‘Computer Physiognomy’. As described within Takeo Kanade's Computer Recognition of Human Faces, the exhibit was the first public demonstration of a FRT in which ‘a person sits before a Picamera, the picture of [their] face is digitised and fed into the computer … [and their] face is classified into one of seven categories, each of which is represented by a very famous person’. A full list of the included celebrity faces is not provided in the text; however, in a 2015 talk, Kanade details how it required the person to stay exactly still for three seconds while their face was digitised, after which their face would be matched to one of faces such as ‘Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy’. From the engineers’ perspectives, the exhibit was a relatively straight-forward tech-demo that leveraged both the spectacle of celebrity faces and emerging computational wizardry.

The NEC described its ‘omputer Physiognomy’ as a ‘magnifying glass’ and billed it as a well-received wonder that was actually quite intimate in how it ‘connected image processing technology with personality analysis’.