Scan Your Face To Enter Your Dorm? University of Kentucky Installs Facial Recognition Tech Around Campus

Once upon a time, college students twisted keys into corresponding locks on residence hall doors to reach their dorm room. Then the process changed to plastic cards, swiped against an entryway box. Now, the latest frontier for college students trying to get to their dorms is AI-enabled facial recognition technology. Yikes!

The University of Kentucky is currently experimenting with this new setup. Facial scanners powered by artificial intelligence have been installed outside several residence halls on its Lexington campus.

The scan-your-face-for-admittance program is voluntary—for now.

But it portends a potentially unsettling direction for the University of Kentucky and U.S. colleges more broadly. Before long, students across the country may have to submit biometric data just to enter the buildings where they have been assigned to live.

Wait, but Why?

It’s part of the inevitable and seemingly unending slog of privacy-invading protocols sold as solutions to problems that are minor or don’t really exist.

What was wrong with key cards? The old technology seems perfectly sufficient. Sure, students might lose their cards every now and then, but dealing with that seems a small inconvenience in an otherwise fine system—one that avoids the drawbacks of AI facial recognition technology.

And those drawbacks seem myriad.

For starters, there’s the expense of installing and maintaining this new system.

Then there’s the risk of malfunctions and errors, which could keep out students who should be allowed in. “In best-case scenarios—such as comparing someone’s passport photo to a photo taken by a border agent—false-negative rates are around two in 1,000,” as Lucas Laursen of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers noted earlier this year.

There’s also the risk of exposing some of students’ most intimate data—the mathematical makeup of their faces—to bad actors.

The University of Kentucky’s test facial-scan program is relying on technology from a company called Alcatraz AI. (“May not be the best name for the product, and we’ve pointed that out,” University of Kentucky Police Chief Joe Monroe commented.)

Alcatraz AI CEO Tina D’Agostin told WKYT that the technology—called Rock—doesn’t store images, just the geometric maps of people’s faces, and that the company does not “have any names or personal identifiers, other than the facial biometric profile that we take, which again, is nothing more than a mathematical equation. You’re zeros and ones to us once you’ve been scanned.”

Still, data linking those ones and zeros to particular identities likely still lives somewhere, such as in a school database.

And records of those ones and zeros on their own could still be invasive, creating a permanent faceprint that could, at any point in the future, be attached to your identity and used for surveillance and tracking.

That Still Doesn’t Explain It

D’Agostin cited enhanced safety as one benefit of using facial scans on campus. She “said the technology helps prevent tailgating, which is when an unauthorized person gains access inside a building by following closely behind someone who scans their way in,” reports WKYT.

“Many times when bad actors have entered dorms when there was an active shooter or whether it was to physically assault a female, they actually entered by tailgating,” she said, “and so many campuses have sought us to provide that intelligence at the door, to empower their security teams to help detect when this incident occurs so they can react to it in real time.”

This sounds nice—but also makes no sense. An unauthorized person could just as easily follow an unwitting resident into a building after the resident scans their face as they could follow an unwitting resident who just swiped a key card. (Presumably, the technology does not only allow in the subject of the facial scan and then swiftly slam the door shut, which would both be dangerous and prevent residents from inviting over guests.)

And in the unlikely scenario of, say, someone with a weapon forcing a resident to grant them access to a building, they could just as easily force someone to show their face as they could force them to pull out their key card.

The real-time reaction idea also falls apart under scrutiny. What’s the actionable item—a perfectly commonplace occurrence like more than one person entering at a time? Someone entering with a face that’s not in the database—which should be perfectly OK unless everyone on campus and all guests are required to be in the facial scan database?

Perhaps D’Agostin means that investigators could later use Rock data after an incident to help pinpoint what happened. But regular security cameras positioned outside a dorm room door could also do this—presumably better than Alcatraz’s system if it’s really just storing anonymized ones and zeros.

To be useful in a crime-solving context, the facial scanning system would have to be doing a lot more than just scanning the faces of residents who had agreed to facial scans. It would have to scan everyone who enters a building, and school authorities would need some way to tie this biometric data to actual identities.

Either the case for installing limited facial recognition technology in campus buildings doesn’t hold up, or schools are dreaming bigger than limited-use cases like this one being tested at the University of Kentucky.

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