Patrons of San Francisco’s bar scene are under a watchful new eye.
A new app launched this weekend will allow users to scan the faces of patrons in 25 bars across the city to determine their ages and genders. Would-be customers can then check their smartphones for real-time updates on the crowd size, average age and male-female mix to decide if the scene is to their liking.
The Texas-based makers of SceneTap say the app does not identify specific individuals or save personal information. However, in a city known for its love of both libations and civil liberties, a backlash erupted even before the first cameras were switched on from bar-goers who said they would boycott bars with SceneTap installed.
SceneTap’s ability to guess how old people are and whether they are men or women relies on advances in a field known as biometrics. A camera at the door snaps your picture and software maps your features to a grid. By measuring distances such as the length between the nose and the eyes and the eyes and the ears, an algorithm matches your dimensions to a database of averages for age and gender.
SceneTap CEO Cole Harper says the app does not invade patrons’ privacy, because the only data it stores is their estimated ages and genders and the time they arrived — not their images or measurements.
“Nothing that we do is collecting personal information. It’s not recorded, it’s not streamed, it’s not individualized,” Harper said.
Whether the company’s promises are comforting or not, it portends a future when any camera-equipped smartphone will be able to recognize faces with a click of the shutter.
Already the iPhone’s camera app will highlight a person’s face with a green box and Apple’s iPhoto software will try to recognize the faces of people to categorize photos automatically by who is in the shot.
Facebook also uses facial recognition software that seeks to identify friends in a photo a user uploads.
SceneTap’s San Francisco debut came the same day Facebook went public. Privacy experts say social media has played a key role in making it easier to name a face.
“Ten years ago, if I walked down the street and took a picture of someone I didn’t know, there was little I could do to find out who that person was. Today it’s a very different story,” said Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who focuses on surveillance technology and privacy.
Tien says facial recognition technology has advanced so much that having your picture taken potentially provides the same degree of identifying data as do your fingerprints. Computer programs can break down high-resolution images in detail to identify the distinctive features of individual faces.
Those patterns, rather than the actual images, make possible the tracking of individuals even without knowing who they are. In theory, a program could also match that pattern to identifiable online images such as a Facebook profile picture.
The threat to privacy from an app like SceneTap depends not just on what is being stored, but how easily the system could be converted to become more intrusive, whether by a hacker or under a court order.
“Even if everything is happening the way it is supposed to, then the next question is: ‘Gee, is that good enough?’” Tien said. “Is that something you’re comfortable with?”
Along with the visual images being deleted nearly as soon as they are snapped, SceneTap’s sensors are not sophisticated enough to recognize individual faces in any case, Harper said. Detecting characteristics like gender and age takes much less digital work than identifying individuals, he said.
The 28-year-old CEO says that SceneTap does not come close to intruding on privacy the way many other ubiquitous technologies already do. Many bars already have video cameras that record customers’ every move, creating an archive that could, for example, be subpoenaed in court. Anyone who uses Facebook or Gmail is turning over reams of sensitive personal information to large companies every day.
SceneTap’s business plan also hinges on the data it collects. Facebook and Google make money by targeting individuals as precisely as possible. Harper says SceneTap only has the combined data on bar customers’ genders and ages. The company hopes advertisers will eventually want that data to target bar-goers through the app while the bars themselves can use the statistics to determine how to target their customers, Harper said.
SceneTap is already in use in six other cities across the US, including Chicago and several college towns.
Charles Hall, general manager of Bar None in San Francisco, said he decided to install SceneTap to give potential customers another way to interact with the business. He said his decision depends on the company’s promise that no information is being collected on individuals.
“I have nothing to gain from doing something that people are going to be up in arms about,” Hall said the day before the official launch.
A few hours later, the bar briefly got cold feet because of the negative attention SceneTap had received in the local media. But as of 10pm on Friday night, Bar None was “lively,” according to the app: a little less than half full, a nearly even mix of sexes, average age 22.
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