Bob Franken: Facing It

For anyone who thought there was the slightest chance of maintaining a sense of personal space, it’s time to get real. Face recognition is here, which means that cameras and sophisticated computers will recognize you even as you, uh, head down the street. Stores will spot you as you pass by; they’ll tap into the minute details of your life and either send enticing emails to your smartphone or alert security if, fairly or unfairly, you’re deemed to be a shoplifting risk or in some other way undesirable.

The latest from the puny efforts to regulate such an intrusion is that government-mediated negotiations between privacy advocates and those in the cyber industry have broken down. To be honest, enforcement of the existing rules has been a failure, one dangerous embarrassment after another. Look no further than hackers compromising Sony Pictures, Target and the records of every government employee. Or there’s the new investigation into the St. Louis Cardinals, who have been accused of attempting to steal a database (as opposed to second) by cracking into the baseball-operations computer of the Houston Astros. Nothing in cyberspace is safe.

As insidious as facial recognition sounds, the bigger threat to our society comes from faces we already recognize: those of the individuals who want to be our leaders in a high-tech future where our individual lives belong to everyone but ourselves. Do we really want a Donald Trump leading the U.S. through the nuanced maze of issues that can determine literally whether we survive? His face is recognizable to just about everyone, and I’ll spare you the snarky comments about his comb-over.

Instead, let’s focus on his simplistic bombast about the complicated problems we face. Our vulnerability in a cyberworld is just one of them. With the click of a mouse we can be brought to our knees, the basic parts of our infrastructure — our electrical system or financial operations — suddenly ground to a halt.

Besides Donald Trump, we see a lowest-common-denominator lineup of those who want to take charge and, for instance, defeat brutal religious extremists who are on a murderous rampage through the Mideast, or stare down the long-established societies in China and Russia, who are adversaries at best. Do we want to entrust our existence to a Ted Cruz or Mike Huckabee, who speak for the intolerant segments of this country? Or a Jeb Bush, who, bluntly, wouldn’t be where he is if it wasn’t for the lineage he’s trying to deny?

What about the Democrats’ front-runner, Hillary Clinton and the questions about her honesty? She’s trying to control that discussion by hiding behind a carefully scripted campaign, where those who might ask inconvenient questions — reporters, for instance — are being shut out.

There are other faces, like Rand Paul, whose answer to government is no government. Or Carly Fiorina, whose main claim to fame is her business record, which is dotted with failure, and the fact that in this race, she’s the other woman.

For the most part, Americans have reacted to this same-old-same-old choice by not thinking about it. We simply go about our private lives and ignore the politicians. Of course, as we’re discovering, our private lives are not private at all anymore.

(Bob Franken is a syndicated columnist.)

Distributed by King Features Synd.