How did you get my face?

New York artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg has started her own project called “Stranger Visions”. She walks around New York City looking for anything that can contain a person’s DNS. Cigarette butts and chewing gum are her main targets if they are fresh enough. From there she takes the item to Genspace, a biotechnology laboratory in Brooklyn, to have the DNA extracted. Using details extracted from the DNA sample, Dewey-Hagborg can identify the persons gender, eye color, hair color, if they had freckles, skin complexion and even where their ancestors were from.

She feeds all of this data into a custom computer program which builds a 3D model of the face. From there she will create multiple variations of the face, enhancing some features and lessening others. When she is satisfied, Dewey-Hagborg brings the 3D computer model to Advanced Media Studio in New York University for it to be printed on a 3D printer. The final result is usually close enough to bear at most a family resemblance of the person.

In a world where everyone is panicking over the National Security Agency collecting and storing metadata why is no one panicking over this? It might be because in the real world we expect other people to be seen by other people, that we expect other people to be able to photograph us and record us as we pass through the city. After all, New York City is a major tourist attraction, people are constantly wandering the streets taking pictures. Furthermore, all stores are almost guaranteed to have security cameras installed to deter shoplifting and robberies. When a person is online however, there are no tourists wandering around photographing what you are looking at, there are no shop owners recording your every action. That people online expect to remain anonymous as there is no way for others to link their name and face with what they do on the internet.

Both the NSA and Dewey-Hagborg are able to collect information about us as they are taking it from a “public” area. The current dilemma that is facing us as well as lawmakers is how do we define what is public information and what is a person’s private information. We don’t own the city streets where we discard cigarette butts or chewing gum nor do we own the cable lines that our information from the internet flows through. Does this mean that anything that we leave on property that we do not own ceases to be ours? Would this mean that restaurants would also be entitled to taking our DNA from utensils, glasses and straws that we leave behind at the end of our meals?

In today’s world almost anything we have, be it chewing gum or our cellphone, contains information about us in some way shape or form. We have to decide once and for all what is public information, where it can be found, what it can contain, etc. Otherwise we open up the possibility of someone like Dewey-Hagborg taking information about us and using it, only the way they use it might not be as benign as creating facial replicas.