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The growth of technologies promising to infer emotions raises political and ethical concerns, including concerns regarding their accuracy and transparency. A marginalized perspective in these conversations is that of data subjects potentially affected by emotion recognition. Taking social media as one emotion recognition deployment context, we conducted interviews with data subjects (i.e., social media users) to investigate their notions about accuracy and transparency in emotion recognition and interrogate stated attitudes towards these notions and related folk theories. We find that data subjects see accurate inferences as uncomfortable and as threatening their agency, pointing to privacy and ambiguity as desired design principles for social media platforms. While some participants argued that contemporary emotion recognition must be accurate, others raised concerns about possibilities for contesting the technology and called for better transparency. Furthermore, some challenged the technology altogether, highlighting that emotions are complex, relational, performative, and situated. In interpreting our findings, we identify new folk theories about accuracy and meaningful transparency in emotion recognition. Overall, our analysis shows an unsatisfactory status quo for data subjects that is shaped by power imbalances and a lack of reflexivity and democratic deliberation within platform governance.
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Facial Recognition: Understanding Concerns and Privacy Attitudes Across Increasingly Diverse Deployment Scenarios
The rapid growth of facial recognition technology across ever more diverse contexts calls for a better understanding of how people feel about these deployments — whether they see value in them or are concerned about their privacy, and to what extent they have generally grown accustomed to them. We present a qualitative analysis of data gathered as part of a 10-day experience sampling study with 123 participants who were presented with realistic deployment scenarios of facial recognition as they went about their daily lives. Responses capturing their attitudes towards these deployments were collected both in situ and through daily evening surveys, in which participants were asked to reflect on their experiences and reactions. Ten follow-up interviews were conducted to further triangulate the data from the study. Our results highlight both the perceived benefits and concerns people express when faced with different facial recognition deployment scenarios. Participants reported concerns about the accuracy of the technology, including possible bias in its analysis, privacy concerns about the type of information being collected or inferred, and more generally, the dragnet effect resulting from the widespread deployment. Based on our findings, we discuss strategies and guidelines for informing the deployment of facial recognition, particularly focusing on ensuring that people are given adequate levels of transparency and control.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1801316
- PAR ID:
- 10289280
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 246-262
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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