Ethical Issues And Perspectives On Emotion Sensing Face Recognition Technology In ICT Industry

Identify a recent (within the last six (6) months) ethical dilemma or ethically questionable situation relating to ICT that you are familiar with. This situation can be either in the media (for example one you have sourced from a newspaper, or online through social media) or through your workplace.

a. If using a workplace example, to maintain confidentiality, do not use real names.

b. If you use a media article you must include the link to the media article in the references list of your assignment.

Identify the key ethical issues contained in your chosen case and use the three distinct perspectives of applied ethics including professional, philosophical, sociological/descriptive ethics to analyse the ethical issues involved in the case.

The expanding trend of new advancements in the ICT industry created the evolvement of the emotion sensing face recognition technology which has taken part in every type of social activities and also for security purposes. The rapid acceptance of this technology is seen in various types of industries. The technology of biometric face recognition technology is highlighted in the last few years due to its safe legal issues and also for its acceptance worldwide. The face recognition technology is a type of biometric systems having many unique features with both advantages and disadvantages as compared with the other biometric systems (Bhatia, 2013). This application of the face detection technology and its related ethical issues are analyzed in this paper as per the ICT policies. The paper would be presented with the description of chief viewpoints of applied ethics. This paper includes professional ethics perspective, philosophical ethics perspective and the sociological ethics perspective (Al-Saggaf, Burmeister & Schwartz, 2017).

In this unit of the paper, the professional ethics of the applied ethics are scrutinised. This perspective accepts standards of human behaviour and gives out the guiding moralities. The types of professional ethics which are accepted by all the global ICT establishments to guide their employers in completing their work by maintaining the ethical values (Durkheim, 2013). It is not only about the proposal but it also emphasis on the acceptance and maintenance of those guidelines with uninterrupted awareness of the needs of the workplaces. The progress in ICT increased the existence of large volumes of structured and unstructured data and management of those data along with all the other types of data is a real challenge for all the ICT organisations and it is also observed that the sectors of a particular organisation which are not following those guidelines are subjected to major financial or other losses. The systems of the organisation can be affected by posting improper content on social media platforms can lead to proceedings and business loss. A major recent ethical dilemma is the application of the face recognition technology in various types of platforms having both positive and negative issues regarding its effectiveness (Wright, 2014).

It can be observed that the extensive use of the technology often leads to many kinds of security issues and personal or organisational losses like the difficulties in processing and storing the data for future usage then the security issues takes place it has to be on a secured system and a secured environment as misleading can cause many difficulties. The emotion sensing face recognition technology is one of the most widely spread ethical issues in ICT industry in 2018, people from all over the world get directly impacted by it. Tim Cahill the CEO and co-founder of an organisation named Inferno were one of the first of its kind who introduced the concept of this technology as wanted to incorporate a sense of feeling in any smart devices with the feeling of understanding and reacting to situations according to the requirements (McDuff, 2013). They wanted to implement a profound understanding into the unfiltered client’s emotional response to digital contents, they thought that the application will be helpful in several types of activities in the gaming industry but there too many security issues associated with it. The ethical professionals of the organisation made better decisions after that and executed better guidelines of ethics that are helpful to an understanding the emotional sensing of face recognition technology as it is directly related to the protection of their clients and helpful in maintaining a long-term relationship with them.  

Philosophical Ethics Perspective

This is another type of applied which raises philosophical questions such as being right or wrong according to the human ethics. The philosophical ethics aims to deal with systemising, protecting and commending perceptions of correct or incorrect (Larrabee, 2016). To withstand in the ever-competitive business world, every organisation adapting to the new technology needs to follow certain philosophies through which they can understand the value of the new technology and take all the necessary steps as required. Being ethically accurate is absolutely crucial when it comes to a philosophical comportment. Every person is expected to be dedicated to their moral values while performing their tasks. The philosophical ethics suggests that an individual should be ethically true to their occupation as well as in their personal life. If the work life of an employee does not allow that person to be ethically justified towards the rest of their life, then this implication is also not acceptable according to the philosophical ethics. But this do not authenticate the fact that if that employee fails to validate those ethics towards their philosophical life (DesJardins, 2014).

Highlighting about the philosophical ethics regarding this incident that had occurred globally regarding the issues in emotional sensing face recognition there are issues such as misinterpretation of personal data, wrongly sensing environments and acting on the basis of wrong understandings which play a very vital role. The viewpoint of the authorized employee in control of the entire course of the emotion sensing face recognition technology is to protect any type of confidential data of any individual or organization who are responsible for maintaining all these perspectives that would be assessed by the philosophical morals. The optimistic and mostly accepted feature of the facial recognition system is its feature in being a robust face recognition prototype built on the ground of mapping of behavioural features with the physiological biometric physiognomies. The various types of physiological features of the human face are taken under consideration with relevance to various expressions such as happiness, sadness or any other type of feelings related with the base matching template of the system. The philosophical ethics perspectives should be considered and evaluated very carefully to improve the effectiveness of the technology in the system (Eden, Jirotka & Stahl, 2013).

In this unit of the document, the sociological perspectives are discussed, the different types of sociological perspectives are normative ethics, meta-ethics, applied ethics and descriptive ethics (Zhou & Piramuthu, 2013). The normative ethics is a category of ethical ways which states every individual to follow and preserve an ethical equilibrium; meta-ethics gives an idea about the authentic ethical concepts behind a behavior of a person. This type of applied ethics are helpful in evaluating the strategies and plans for making effective decisions and defining the professional goals in such a way so that it would benefit the organisation and help them grow in spite of the market rivalries. The stakeholder of the organisations establishes the ethical codes and all the employers are bound to obey those rules and regulations for maintaining professional growth, accomplishing organizational goals, maintaining the reliability of the profession by defining the expected behaviour of the employers. The policies should be implemented in such a way so that it protects the welfare of subjects and the fulfil client requirements (Greenwood, 2013).

Sociological Ethics Perspective

There are different types of the sociological perspectives of the chosen technology such as the choice of an individual regarding the resolution of the of the image captured in the face detection system is a type of limitation of this type of technology as the original size of the photo is resized to a significant extent causing a direct impact on the society. Issues such as false recognitions are a very common issue of this topic it may lead to many complexities in any environment. Also, the huge investments required for installing the mechanism into any system also have an impact on the society and hiring experienced professionals are required for maintaining the efficiency of the system using this feature is the other major issue of this topic.

According to (Hofmann, 2013) there are many other complex issues such as any changes in the face like the growth of facial hairs, wearing different spectacles or sunglasses may block or delays the validation process which makes a large section of the society very much cautious and choosy while deciding to accept and install this technology. To remove the social issues, the databases of the systems should be updated on a regular basis to avoid difficulties like data storing and data processing. Maintaining the privacy is the biggest issue that the society has with the application of the human sensing face detection technology as users of the system can produce a biometric framework of all the social media photos, which can be used in mass investigation procedure and identification purposes. Biometric data security is another issue regarding the acceptance of human sensing face detection technology in the society as most people are in secured about its effectiveness and ethical values due to the increasing amount of issue created by it on a global basis (Castillo, 2016).

Conclusion

Thus, it can be concluded that emotion sensing face recognition technology is the outcome of the growths in ICT industry have different kinds of impacts on the users worldwide, and the necessity for smearing all the three different types of distinct perspectives so that the corporations can deal with all the ethical issues which they generally face from different sections of the society. The different types of perspectives provide a very significant part in manipulating the individual behaviours within a society.

References

Al-Saggaf, Y., Burmeister, O. K., & Schwartz, M. (2017). Qualifications and ethics education: the views of ICT professionals. Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 21.

Bhatia, R. (2013). Biometrics and face recognition techniques. International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering, 3(5).

Castillo, J. C., Castro-González, Á., Fernández-Caballero, A., Latorre, J. M., Pastor, J. M., Fernández-Sotos, A., & Salichs, M. A. (2016). Software architecture for smart emotion recognition and regulation of the ageing adult. Cognitive Computation, 8(2), 357-367.

DesJardins, J. R. (2014). An introduction to business ethics. McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

Durkheim, E. (2013). Professional ethics and civic morals. Routledge.

Eden, G., Jirotka, M., & Stahl, B. (2013, May). Responsible research and innovation: Critical reflection into the potential social consequences of ICT. In Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS), 2013 IEEE Seventh International Conference on (pp. 1-12). IEEE.

Greenwood, M. (2013). Ethical analyses of HRM: A review and research agenda. Journal of Business Ethics, 114(2), 355-366.

Hofmann, B. (2013). Ethical challenges with welfare technology: a review of the literature. Science and engineering ethics, 19(2), 389-406.

Larrabee, M. J. (2016). An ethic of care: Feminist and interdisciplinary perspectives. Routledge.

McDuff, D. (2013, June). Rana el Kaliouby, Thibaud Senechal, May Amr, Jeffrey F. Cohn, Rosalind Picard, Affectiva-MIT Facial Expression Dataset (AM-FED): Naturalistic and Spontaneous Facial Expressions Collected" In-the-Wild. In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (pp. 881-888).

Wright, D., Finn, R., Gellert, R., Gutwirth, S., Schütz, P., Friedewald, M., ... & Mordini, E. (2014). Ethical dilemma scenarios and emerging technologies. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 87, 325-336.

Zhou, W., & Piramuthu, S. (2013). Technology regulation policy for business ethics: An example of RFID in supply chain management. Journal of business ethics, 116(2), 327-340.