Dina Temple-Raston
Host and managing editor of the Click Here podcast and senior correspondent at Recorded Future News, covering cybersecurity, technology and national security.
“Sometimes friction is exactly where privacy lives. And that friction with facial recognition is going away.”
Click Here · Software Engineering & Infra · November 2026
Context
Temple-Raston describes walking through an airport decades ago, when strangers saw your face but couldn't name you. She calls this 'practical anonymity' and says facial recognition removes the effort that protected it.
Transcript
…privacy. Your face is necessarily public, but until fairly recently, that didn't mean it was actually identifiable by anybody who happened to see it. We used to have this kind of practical anonymity. You could be visible without necessarily being known, but facial recognition is eroding that.
Well, I want to stick with that phrase practical anonymity because you're not saying people used to be invisible. It's just that they were harder to identify. I mean, just pull on that thread a bit for us.
Well, so think about walking through an airport 30 years ago. Hundreds of people would see your face. You weren't in private in the literal sense, but unless someone recognized you, you were pretty much anonymous, just another face in the crowd. And that tiny little bit of friction actually really mattered because identification took time, it took effort, and often required another human being who already knew who you were going, hey, Dina. You know, technology has removed a lot of that friction. And we tend to talk about friction as this bad thing, that technology is always promising to eliminate it, but. Sometimes friction is exactly where privacy lives. And that friction with facial recognition is going away.
But there's an obvious tension here. The same friction that protects my anonymity can make it much harder to find, say, a missing child. What's the case for widespread facial recognition technology?
Well, that's the strongest case for facial recognition technology is that someone is missing. Someone has been identified, unidentified for years. A family is waiting. And suddenly there's this technology that can search across enormous numbers of faces and maybe produce a lead. And in those…
Dina 404 Media reporting found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to give potentially more than a thousand local law enforcement agencies a facial recognition app. It would query a database of hundreds of millions of images to verify someone's immigration status. And that information…
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