Page 48 - Security Today, October 2019

Ushering in a New Era Consumers are more concerned with how their activities are being tracked
BPy Neil Huntingdon
rivacy issues continue to dominate headlines as the world’s biggest companies are being chal- lenged on the ways they collect and use people’s data. Consumers are growing more concerned about how their activities are being tracked across
the web as companies sell information to advertisers for a profit. At the same time, the public is worried about how different types of technologies are tracking them offline. Facial recognition technology, powered by artificial intelligence to match images against various databases, has become particularly controversial. While consumers are fine with some implementations of facial recognition technology, such as unlocking their smartphone or tagging their friends in photo albums, the bigger concern is how
it could be used for surveillance.
In May, San Francisco banned the use of facial recognition
technology by city agencies, as legislators argued that the technol- ogy infringes on people’s privacy. Other cities are also considering regulating facial recognition technology as the debate around it continues to heat up. As businesses look to upgrade their security systems, privacy concerns will increasingly be a key factor in pur- chasing decisions. So what alternatives do businesses have as they work to keep people safe and protect their assets?
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The Next Generation of Security
Lidar technology promises to usher in a new era of anonymized security. While lidar is best known for enabling cars to autono- mously navigate, lidar is ideal for a wide range of use cases includ- ing security, industrial, IoT, mapping and transport applications. Lidar works by using lasers to calculate the distance between itself and other objects. This creates a point cloud with a three- dimensional representation of people and objects in an area.
With its high-resolution imaging, lidar offers a number of ad- vantages over both traditional security systems and modern facial recognition systems. However, the biggest differentiator is that lidar enables robust surveillance while still protecting people’s privacy. With the ability to detect, track and classify objects, li- dar systems can be configured to only highlight potential threats, guaranteeing the anonymity of people or objects not deemed a threat. While lidar does not show facial features, the imaging data is high resolution and 3D, providing valuable information about an object’s location, velocity and size.
Compared to current technologies where everyone’s biometric data is captured and stored, regardless of whether they are in- volved in a security incident, lidar is a considerable step forward for anonymized surveillance.
PRIVACY ISSUES
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