The Wall Street Journal - 31.07.2019

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Wednesday, July 31, 2019 |A

DOMINIC BUGATTO

LIFE & ARTS

Threat Detection

Last year, the Lockport City

School District in upstate New York

became one of the first school sys-

tems in the nation to purchase fa-

cial-recognition software, which it

began testing in June.

Here’s how it works, according

to SN Technologies Corp., the Ca-

nadian firm that developed the

software: School districts create a

database containing photos of stu-

dents and adults who aren’t per-

mitted to be on school grounds.

The software is integrated into

school cameras, and scans for a

match. If one is detected, school

administrators receive an alert. SN

Technologies’ software can also

detect a gun—if it’s in a person’s

hand, not if it’s concealed—which

results in a notification being sent

to first responders. The company

says that having information on

who and where a shooter is could

enable police to locate and stop a

shooter more quickly.

The interest in the software

drew concern from Monica Wal-

lace, a member of the New York

State Assembly. “The more I

thought about it the more I real-

ized how concerning it is that we

don’t have any policies in place

and that no one has given it any

detailed thought before rushing

forward,” the Democratic law-

maker told me.

She said one school district al-

ready has indicated it wants to use

facial recognition for disciplinary

purposes as well as threat assess-

ments. “Is this going to be a surveil-

lance state for our kids?” she said.

She introduced legislation to

halt the implementation of facial

recognition in New York schools

until the state’s education depart-

ment can conduct a review and es-

tablish guidelines for its possible

use.

The use of children’s biometric

data is coming under scrutiny by

Say ‘Cheese!’

This summer, families are start-

ing to encounter facial recognition

when they send their kids off to

camp. Camp photographers can

upload photos to a service, where

they are scanned and identified.

Parents would then receive photos

of their kids via text or a website.

Waldo Photos Inc. is one of the

services, now offered at more than

150 summer camps across the

country. Camps either pay for

Waldo themselves and offer it to

parents or they ask parents to pay

directly at a price of $1 to $2 per

child a day. If parents want to sign

up to receive photos through

Waldo, they have to submit a ref-

erence photo of their child so that

the AI can detect a match. The im-

ages are stored until a parent asks

forthemtobedeleted.

Rodney Rice, Waldo’s founder,

said the facial data the company

the Federal Trade Commission,

which earlier this month launched

a review of the Children’s Online

Privacy Protection Act, a 1998 law

that requires children’s websites to

obtain parental consent before col-

lecting, using or disclosing a

child’s personal information. The

FTC is now seeking comment on

whether the definition of “per-

sonal information” should be ex-

panded to include biometric data.

The makers of facial-recognition

software argue that concerns

about the technology are over-

blown because people don’t really

understand it. For these compa-

nies, facial data isn’t captured and

stored as a usable image, but

rather as lengthy chains of num-

bers and letters that can only be

deciphered by proprietary soft-

ware. Developers argue the data

would be meaningless to anyone

who doesn’t have their model.

Both Waldo Photos Inc., above, and

SN Technologies Corp., above right,

use facial-recognition technology in

their software and services.

FACIAL RECOGNITIONis no
longer just being used to unlock
iPhones, tag Facebook friends and
scan crowds for security threats. It’s
moving into summer camps, youth
sports tournaments and schools.
At summer camps across the
country, parents can opt into facial-
recognition services to receive pho-
tos of their camper without having
to sift through hun-
dreds of group shots
for proof that little
Susie is having a
good time climbing
ropes. One facial-
recognition software
manufacturer has
proposals in front of
several K-12 public school districts
to install the technology to help
identify and track potential shoot-
ers on campus.
While commercial applications
of facial-recognition software
abound—and bear their own fair
share of controversy—the fact that
this latest wave is geared toward
children has privacy experts and
politicians urging parents and
school districts to think twice.
Concerns over this precious
data—children’s faces—range from
accuracy to abuse. Could it one day
be used for purposes other than
that for which it’s currently in-
tended?
In the movie “Minority Report,”
biometric systems created for mar-
keting are commandeered to hunt
down citizens suspected of wrong-
doing. There’s no evidence of this
happening yet, but as science fic-
tion goes, it’s not too far-fetched.
“We’re in the very early stages of
commercial, nongovernmental use
of facial recognition and we
shouldn’t be waiting until harms oc-
cur to do something, we should be
acting now to mitigate the harms,”
said Nathan Sheard, a grass-roots
advocacy organizer with the Elec-
tronic Frontier Foundation.

In Men, Anxiety Can

Often Look Different

Instead of coming across as worry, anxiety in men often appears as anger,

muscle aches or alcohol use—leading many men to go undiagnosed

uses to identify kids would be no

good to anyone else. “The misper-

ception is that facial recognition is

a fingerprint. I could hand a 40-

digit alphanumeric hash to Google

or Facebook and they couldn’t do

anything with it,” he said. “I’m a

father of three and I’d have never

started this business if I was going

to be putting kids at risk.”

People daily exchange personal

data—including their children’s—for

convenience, or even just for fun. A

recent example was the mass up-

loading of selfies to a Russian app

called FaceApp, where people could

see what they might look like when

they’re older.

“At some point we have to stop

and ask ourselves whether the

costs to our privacy are no longer

outweighed by the benefits,” said

Sean McGrath, managing editor at

ProPrivacy.com, a digital privacy

advocacy group. FROM LEFT: WALDO PHOTOS; SN TECHNOLOGIES

to start seeing them as a human be-

ing not only anxious and depressed

but struggling with what they ex-

pect of themselves and what society

expects of them,” he says.

Avoiding diagnostic labels may

also help. Dr. McKay doesn’t men-

tion the word anxiety during the

first couple of therapy sessions

with some men. Dr. Chapman says

some of his patients are more

comfortable calling treatment

“coaching” or “help with perfor-

mance” that is focused on “dis-

tress at work.”

Many men, of course, are com-

fortable discussing their emotions

and using terms like anxiety and

depression. Still, short-term, goal-

oriented treatments that focus on

changing behavior, like cognitive

behavioral therapy, might be more

palatable for many men. CBT usu-

ally involves 12 to 15 weekly ses-

sions. “A more practical approach,

a more coaching-oriented ap-

proach is going to feel more famil-

iar to a lot of men,” says Dr. Addis.

“It’s not a lot different than get-

ting a golf lesson.”

John Borders had been strug-

gling with panic attacks and trou-

bling obsessive thoughts for years

before his wife convinced him to

see a therapist for anxiety and ob-

sessive compulsive disorder. “I

didn’t understand what was going

on in my mind,” said Mr. Borders,

a 54-year-old lawyer in Louisville.

He then had two brief stints of

therapy that he says weren’t very

helpful before he started CBT and

exposure and response prevention

treatment (a version of CBT that is

used for OCD) with Dr. Chapman.

At that point, Mr. Borders had an

intense fear of driving on high-

ways. “My heart would race. I’d

think I was going to run off the

road.” So Dr. Chapman had Mr.

Borders drive on highways, and, to

up the anxiety symptoms even

more, do so after drinking coffee.

“I would drink a double shot of

espresso and get on the highway

and drive,” said Mr. Borders. “That

really helped.”

Mr. California did get cognitive

behavioral therapy and took medi-

cation. While he still deals with

anxiety, he largely recovered and

finished college and a master’s de-

gree in educational psychology.

Opening up to his co-workers and

developing friendships, he says,

has been critical, too. “Being able

to talk to someone is anxiety-re-

ducing,” he says. “It’s meant a tre-

mendous amount to me to feel a

sense of love and belonging where

I’m no longer alone.”

W

hen a man ex-
plodes in anger
over something
seemingly insig-
nificant, he may
appear like just a jerk. But he
could be anxious.
Anxiety problems can look dif-
ferent in men. When people think
of anxiety, they may picture the
excessive worry and avoidance of
frightening situations that often
plague those who suffer. These af-
flict men, too. But there’s a grow-
ing recognition among psycholo-
gists that men are more likely to
complain of headaches, difficulty
sleeping and muscle aches and
pains. They are more likely to use
alcohol and drugs to cope with
anxiety, so what looks like a drink-
ing problem may actually be an
underlying anxiety disorder. And
anxiety in men often manifests as
anger and irritability.
Anxious “men may present as
loose cannons, but they are worri-
ers,” says Kevin Chapman, a clini-
cal psychologist in Louisville, Ky.
“Aggression tends to be more so-
cially acceptable to many men
than anxiety.”
Studies have found that about
one in five men (and about one in
three women) will have an anxiety
disorder during their lifetime. But
psychologists are increasingly con-
cerned that those numbers under-
report male cases.
This is particularly worrisome
now that more research is finding
a link between anxiety and suicide.
Depression is the mental illness
most strongly associated with sui-
cidal thoughts, but it doesn’t often
lead to suicidal acts, according to
a 2010 study by researchers at
Harvard University and Harvard
Medical School. Instead it is anxi-
ety disorders, along with sub-
stance abuse and conduct disorder,
that are most strongly associated
with suicide attempts; the link be-
tween anxiety and suicide has
been echoed in more recent stud-
ies as well. Men are more than
three times more likely to die by
suicide than women, and suicide
rates are on the rise in the U.S.,
according to the Centers for Dis-
ease Control and Prevention.
“People who are panicky and
have a desire to escape from a sit-
uation they perceive to be intoler-
able, that could be the spark to act
on their [suicidal] thoughts,” says
Matthew K. Nock, a psychology
professor at Harvard and an au-
thor of the study.
In general, men are less likely to

BYANDREAPETERSEN

Facial Recognition Tech Comes to

Schools and Summer Camps

FAMILY & TECH| JULIE JARGON

Five Things to Consider

Parents should ask these questions

before consenting to facial recogni-

tion for their children, say privacy

experts.

1.Where will my child’s facial data

be stored and for how long?

2.Will the data be shared with

third parties and, if so, what are

their policies for storing and sharing

the data?

3.Are there purposes for the data

other than what’s being advertised?

For example, will my child’s facial

data be used to train AI for law en-

forcement or corporate partners?

4.What happens to my child’s data

if the service provider is sold?

5.What happens to the data if I de-

cide I no longer want to use this ser-

vice? Will it be deleted immediately?

receive treatment for mental

health issues. “We’ve been social-

ized from a very young age to see

emotional vulnerability as a weak-

ness,” says Michael Addis, a pro-

fessor of psychology and director

of the Men’s Well-Being Research

Group at Clark University in

Worcester, Mass. “Seeking help is

seen as a sign of weakness as

well,” for some men.

Anxiety is a normal human

emotion, of course. But it becomes

a disorder when it is so severe and

constant that it impairs a person’s

life, interfering with work and re-

lationships. Anxiety disorders and

depression often occur together.

The most well-researched and ef-

fective treatments for anxiety dis-

orders are cognitive behavioral

therapy, which teaches patients to

alter problematic thinking that fu-

els anxiety and to actively ap-

proach situations they fear, and

antidepressant medications like

Prozac and Lexapro.

Aaron California had been anx-

ious since childhood: He avoided

parties and had intense anxiety be-

fore taking tests. At 19, he realized

that anxiety was “ruining my life,”

says Mr. California, now 31 years

old and an aide in Moscow, Idaho,

for people with disabilities. “It

caused me to drop out [of college].

I ended up quitting my job,” be-

cause he was so afraid of making

mistakes. Still, he resisted getting

treatment because of “the stigma of

being judged by others,” he says.

Men often seek treatment after

a work crisis—or, especially, at the

urging of a partner. But what is

the best way to encourage a man

to get help for anxiety? One thing

not to do is deliver an ultimatum:

Thatcanleadtoapowerstruggle

and actually increase someone’s

resistance to treatment. Instead,

“highlight that their quality of life

is suffering,” says Dean McKay, a

psychology professor at Fordham

University in New York and a past

president of the Association for

Behavioral and Cognitive Thera-

pies. Tell your loved one that with

effective treatment, “you’ll enjoy

stuff so much more. We can enjoy

each other more if you are able to

manage this thing. That is pretty

compelling.”

Dr. Addis suggests expressing

your own distress about your loved

one’s suffering, how you’re worry-

ing, how you’re not sleeping. And

above all, be compassionate.

“Rather than seeing him as a sort of

stubborn, unwilling typical man, try