Profs and Pints Philadelphia: How We’re Watched

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “How We’re Watched,” on the long history and chilling future of the surveillance of faces and bodies, with Sharrona Pearl, associate professor of bioethics and history at Drexel University and author of Do I Know You? From Face Blindness to Superrecognition.

Many of us associate facial recognition technology with sci fi depictions of a dystopian future. The reality, however, is that technology intended to track our faces and bodies has already been with us for a very long time.

Learn about the fascinating and fraught history of biometric surveillance, and where it might be headed, with Professor Sharrona Pearl, historian and theorist of the face and body whose other books include Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other and About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain.

We’ll look back at the analogue precursors to today’s digital surveillance tools. You’ll learn about physiognomy, which involved “reading” facial features to learn about character, as well about the development and use of fingerprinting. You’ll be introduced to figures such as Alphonse Bertillon, the French police officer and biometric researcher who developed the first scientific system that used measurements of body parts to track criminals and later played a key role in standardizing the use of mug shots. You’ll learn how the chief East German border guard at Checkpoint Charlie, the busiest border between East German and West Germany during the Cold War, developed an analogue system of face recognition technology to prevent people from sneaking across the border.

Focusing on the present, Professor Pearl will talk about current facial recognition technology and how a dramatic decline in the number of false positives made through it should not be interpreted as meaning it has improved. She’ll discuss how we should be concerned about how much our privacy is being eroded as increasingly effective and accurate surveillance technology tracks people across time and space. You’ll learn about the deep biases embedded in the tracking of people by their physical features. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 3 pm. Talk starts at 4:30.)

Image: From an illustration of a facial recognition system by Basem Assiri and Alamgir Hossain (Creative Commons).