Hollywood gives indiscriminate live facial recognition the superhero treatment
A Hollywood production has depicted indiscriminate live facial recognition technology through a superhero narrative, framing the surveillance capability in a favorable or dramatic light.
Why this matters: How facial recognition gets portrayed in popular culture matters more than it sounds. Superhero stories tend to make mass surveillance look clean, necessary, and heroic. In real life, live facial recognition scans everyone in a crowd, not just the bad guys. It gets people wrong, and when it does, the consequences are not cinematic. Normalizing this technology through entertainment makes it easier for governments and companies to deploy it with less public pushback. That is worth paying attention to.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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