The Centre for Technology and Global Affairs (CTGA) produces research on the transforming impact of modern technology on international relations, government, and society. Based at Oxford University’s Department of Politics and International Relations, it is the first global research initiative focusing on the study of technology in a political science department at any of the world’s major universities.

The Centre seeks to create a new body of knowledge on the political and social impact of ongoing technological changes and to apply these new understandings to the guidance of policy practice. The Centre’s research is wide ranging. Faculty, researchers, and associates explore developments across a broad spectrum of technological dimensions – including cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. Connections between our researchers and the wider world of government and industry are at the heart of our impact mission.

Technology and Global Affairs

Anonymity in the Age of Ubiquitous Facial Recognition

Innar Liiv / September 12, 2018 /

Facial Recognition Technology will have a severe impact on society in the future, resulting in a loss of anonymity for everybody. The Russian artist Egor Tsvetkov demonstrated with an experiment that it is already possible today to identify random people on the metro by just using their photos and a facial recognition app. Currently this was done by processing images afterwards with face search and augmenting it with human verification, but it is not difficult to imagine every cell phone or connected car being able to identify anyone’s face and perform a search on the web within less than a second. Instead of classical fears of big brother’s mass surveillance, there might be technology ready for peer-to-peer mass surveillance. The …