In the 1960’s American mathematician and computer scientist Woody Bledsoe was experimenting in pattern recognition and rudimentary computerized devices able to locate the patterns of biometric features.

After nearly sixty years of fine tuning, digital facial recognition is now implanted everywhere in the modern world and has become a golden goose for companies like Facebook, making their gargantuan profits out of harvesting private data to train deep neural networks that will elaborate profitable behavioral predictions and behavioral modification tools.

The Randian heroes of Silicon Valley have created a new system of management of humanity that is trans-national and trans-political, and is used by billions of people interconnected in a new version of reality. By doing so, the big tech heroes have become the richest men in the world.

They’ve spread the philosophy of objectivism into the fabric of society bypassing users awareness, and they’ve mislead billions of people into becoming hostages of the products of surveillance capitalism, unimpeded by the legislative vacuum.  

Smart devices are engineered to be Trojan horses in the life of the users. Every regular internet or smartphone user of today is unwillingly sharing an uninterrupted stream of private information, training deep neural networks conceived to predict, emulate, manipulate, and ultimately manage human thinking and behavior.

Data collected by Chinese tech giants like Huawei, Baidu or Alibaba has been put to use in the effort of making what is, de facto, the first digital dictatorship of humankind. The biometrics of every Chinese citizen - or anyone who enters China - are in the hands of the government. Alibaba and Huawei developed facial recognition softwares able to target different Chinese ethnic groups, and while the middle class of the rich cities is spending money using “smile-to-pay”, a payment method based of face recognition, in the northern province of Xinjiang the government is pushing the limits of digital control on the Uyghur population.  

According to a study released in 2020 by AlgorithmWatch, at least 11 member states of the European Union have police forces using face recognition technologies, and eight more have approved plans to introduce them.

And while the European legislators get pampered by the big tech lobbies, the illusion of freedom given by the connected world is shattered by the theft of the biometric data of billions of users, collected to become the ultimate instrument of control and power.

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                                                              rv, 2020