M
y first facial-recognition
moment—my instant of
facial-recognition recogni-
tion, you might say—hap-
pened when I arrived late on
a flight from Europe and
carried myself to the Global Entry kiosks.
For years the Global Entry process, an accel-
erated automatic immigration check for
prescreened travelers, began with a passport
and fingerprint scan. This time, the screen
told me simply to stand in a frame for a pic-
ture: Click. The image was unflattering—or
maybe very flattering of somebody who had
spent eight hours in an airplane seat. It
was with a chill, then, that I watched my per-
sonal information appear onscreen: name,
passport number, flight. The computer, like
a paparazzo stalking small celebrities, had
recognized me from one awful photo. Unlike
a paparazzo, it had linked this recognition
to a governmental file.
And that was just one process that
announced itself! Imagine how many
opportunities the day presents for facial
recognition. You walk your dog: There you
are on the traffic cameras. You pay your
sitter: Wink for the camera at the ATM. A
trip to the Necessary but Embarrassing
Aisle in the drugstore? Say cheese. That’s to
say nothing of the many times we show our
visage in the digital world, in ways both
unavoidable (video chat, social media) and
elective (consider the face-recognition login
of the iPhone X). Stores such as Saks and
Walmart have experimented with the tech-
nology to identify potential shoplifters;
hospitals have begun using it at entrances
to identify potential predators; and a soft-
ware called Churchix, terrifyingly, uses it to
figure out who actually shows up in church.
It is one thing to know that we are being
photographed—the flaneur’s pleasure is to
watch and be watched in public—and anoth-
er to know that we are connected instantly to
a digital depository that anyone, trustworthy
or untrustworthy, governmental or com-
mercial, might be keeping on our habits and
our lives. The face is the new fingerprint. To
today’s tech, each of us has grown as widely
recognizable as an A-list movie star; our lives,
if not our minds, have become open books.
Time for the dark glasses—which is anoth-
er way of saying, Let the fashion begin. For
years, the face was the fixed point at the
center of the swirl of fashion. Sure, there
have been moments of facial flamboyance on
the runway (Alexander McQueen’s winged
eyes and grotesque clown mouths or Mat-
ty Bovan’s warrior-like paint and Eckhaus
Latta’s splatter makeup), but innovations
324
