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.
“The shift isn't just that computers got better at recognizing faces. The shift is that the database that they're searching is now the whole internet.”
Click Here · Software Engineering & Infra · November 2026
Context
Asked what has changed about facial recognition, which police have used for years, Temple-Raston says it used to be limited to mugshot or passport databases; now systems search photos scraped from social media, news sites and school websites.
Transcript
Thank you so much.
Dina, facial recognition itself isn't new. I mean, police have been using it for years. So what's actually changed and why does it remain controversial?
Well, what's really changed is the scale and the haystack. For a long time, facial recognition was mostly limited by the database you could search. So police might compare a face against mugshots. Border Patrol could compare you against maybe a passport photo. And the technology could only find you if you were already in the system it was searching. What's really changed is that some systems are now casting a much wider net. Your picture has been scraped, for example, from the public internet, social media, news sites, company pages, school websites. Basically, all those photographs we blithely uploaded years ago now can be searchable. And that shift isn't just that computers got better at recognizing faces. The shift is that the database that they're searching is now the whole internet.
Well, that's a really meaningful distinction because if we're talking about a mugshot database that contains people who have been arrested, the internet is all of us. So how much does that expand the reach of who's searchable?
Well, it's a huge expansion because it includes anybody who has left even the tiniest visual digital trail online. And that fundamentally changes the whole idea of who is searchable. A six-year-old isn't going to be in a mugshot database. A missing person may never have been arrested. Someone whose…
But we have been through different versions of this before. Google made the web searchable. Social media made our relationships searchable. Why is the face different?
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