Audio Logs 48: The Blur

Julian Pankratz

This is Audio Logs. I’m Julian Pankratz. Alizebeth Bequin directs Frothly’s privacy programs, including Scramble, which builds tools to protect people from facial recognition. Alizebeth, welcome.

Alizebeth Bequin

Thank you. It’s nice to be remembered long enough to be invited.

Julian Pankratz

That sounds like a joke with a story behind it.

Alizebeth Bequin

People have always found my face hard to remember. Colleagues walk past me in corridors. Waiters forget my order. For years I thought of it as a small curse. These days I think of it as a professional qualification.

Julian Pankratz

Scramble’s tagline is that it makes people “a blur.” What does that mean in practice?

Alizebeth Bequin

It means a recognition system looks at you and fails to settle on an identity. Not that you disappear, which would draw attention, but that you become nobody in particular. Our tools work on several fronts at once: the face, the way you walk, the patterns in how you move through a city. People are recognized by much more than their faces now.

Julian Pankratz

Who uses it?

Alizebeth Bequin

Journalists meeting sources. Organizers who need to attend a protest without being catalogued. People leaving abusive relationships whose former partners have access to camera networks. Around 190,000 people in thirty-eight countries, as of this year.

Julian Pankratz

Critics say tools like this help criminals evade the police.

Alizebeth Bequin

I understand the concern. But being unrecognized in public used to be the normal condition of life. Nobody had to justify it. Mass recognition is the new thing, and it’s the new thing that should have to make its case. We are trying to preserve something people had for all of history until about ten years ago.

Julian Pankratz

Your colleague Robert Arctor has a paper coming out on how recognition systems explain their decisions.

Alizebeth Bequin

It’s an important paper. When a system flags someone, it produces an explanation: a heat map, a list of features. Robert’s work shows those explanations are often wrong. The system says it looked at your face; in fact it looked at your coat. If explanations like that are going to be used as evidence, people deserve to know how unreliable they are.

Julian Pankratz

What do you most want listeners to understand?

Alizebeth Bequin

That privacy in public isn’t a contradiction. You can be seen without being identified. You can walk down a street without leaving a permanent record of having done so. That used to be called freedom. It still should be.

Julian Pankratz

Alizebeth Bequin, thank you.

Alizebeth Bequin

Thank you. I hope you’ll remember me.