Ship of Fools: Facial recognition to track church attendance

Thread: Facial recognition to track church attendance Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Sipech (# 16870) on :

Premier are reporting that some churches are starting to use facial recognition technology to track church attendances.

How messed up is this? [Confused]

We seem to have replaced

quote:
"By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

with

quote:
"By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, that your attendance was recorded by our surveillance equipment and stored in our database."

Though I do love the absurdity of the Mal Fletcher's epithet: a social futurist. [Paranoid]

Do any shipmates think this is in any way justifiable?

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

No - sounds like Big Brother to me. The next thing will be biometric offering envelopes to track giving.

I didn't know this was happening. But, as a joke, I said to our URC Synod Moderator at a meeting just last Saturday that they missed a trick by not having facial recognition technology installed a the College entrance, to check the attendance of his Ministers!

[ 19. June 2015, 08:21: Message edited by: Baptist Trainfan ]

Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :

[Paranoid]

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

Church is a voluntary association, not a fucking employment contract.

Posted by rolyn (# 16840) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Sipech:
We seem to have replaced
quote:
"By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

Maybe someone somewhere finally realised that method of recognising Christians wasn't working too well.

What on earth does anyone want this kind of data for? Having said that there may come a day when our fundamental counter-parts in the Mid-East would be keen to view it [Paranoid]

The idea of cameras in Church also got me thinking of how far we've moved on from the time when the village Squire would sit in his special pew whereby he could view the hat-stand, thus deducing who was or wasn't in attendance.
If a tenant wasn't in attendance on a Sunday without good reason, then chances were an eviction order would be delivered to them on the Monday.

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
Church is a voluntary association, not a fucking employment contract.

Yes, I would think this breaches UK data protection law.

Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
Church is a voluntary association, not a fucking employment contract.

You reckon?

Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Zappa:

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
Church is a voluntary association, not a fucking employment contract.
You reckon?

OK then, it's a call, not a pressgang.

Posted by *Leon* (# 3377) on :

Unless face recognition technology has got a lot better since I last checked, this won't work nearly as well as its proponents might claim.

Over-hyping the capabilities of face recognition is a very common phenomenon. It works OK-ish if you know who you're supposed to be looking at, they're standing still in a predictable pose against a white background and you've got a good reference image. (i.e. in a booth for auto-checking passports or similar situations). Spotting faces in crowds is much harder but if you can say with a straight face that you've solved it then lots of governments will tend to shower you with money without really checking if the tech stands a chance of doing anything useful. Things also get harder if you've got a large group of people who you might be looking for.

As an aside, I'm very confused by why a church would particularly need to track attendance by individual members, which seems to be the application.

Posted by frin (# 9) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
Church is a voluntary association, not a fucking employment contract.
Yes, I would think this breaches UK data protection law.

It would if you did it without telling people you were doing it, but it would be okay to track attendance by individuals if you had declared that you do it (after all, you can keep a register at anything).

Tracking attendance is rare in UK churches, as far as I can see, but if we did, we would realise far sooner when someone just vanishes from church life. And, anecdotally, I know lots of people who stopped going to church because of a personal crisis and the church didn't notice or act on that vanishing act, which is a pastoral misstep. In most of these anecdotes, the person didn't return to that local church as they felt unrecognized and unloved.

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

quote:
Originally posted by frin:
Tracking attendance is rare in UK churches, as far as I can see, but if we did, we would realise far sooner when someone just vanishes from church life.

Nonconformist used to have "Communion cards" to monitor attendance: little numbered tear-off slips which they put into the offering at Communion once a month. My church had them back in the 70s. These are the things: you can see the tear-off bits round the edge (which will need to have the member's number written in).

Before that tokens were used: there is a display of them in the library of Westminster College, Cambridge. Here are some nice Scottish ones.

The deacons or elders would note the numbers and chase up absentees. If anyone was absent for (say) 6 months without good cause, they lost their right to vote at congregational meetings.

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :

There are differences there in intent, scope and medium.

Someone on our church's pastoral team keeps an informal register of attendance, mostly just for recording purposes, also to have an objective idea of numbers. However, it is private and not on an easily circulated medium.

That is not the same as trying to keep track of everyone who enters the building. Nor is it the same as trying to keep track of attendance of members for church discipline purposes (i.e. access to communion). And a big difference here is the storage of data on a medium which could probably be hacked, and the data disseminated, quite easily.

The more sophisticated the technology used, the faster privacy issues get really complex.

Posted by HCH (# 14313) on :

Never mind the rest of it; how is this cost-justified?

Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on :

quote:
Originally posted by rolyn:

The idea of cameras in Church also got me thinking of how far we've moved on from the time when the village Squire would sit in his special pew whereby he could view the hat-stand, thus deducing who was or wasn't in attendance.
If a tenant wasn't in attendance on a Sunday without good reason, then chances were an eviction order would be delivered to them on the Monday.

er, define "how far we've come" and who you mean by "we."

There's a village up the road from me where not only is it in the tenancy agreements that all houses must have their curtains open by 0930 except in cases of illness or death, but I have *seen* the squire knocking on peoples' doors because there aren't enough people in church on a Sunday in the last 2 years.

Then he sits in the front box pew with his wife, leaving only to read the lessons. Every week.

Welcome to Oxfordshire, where the local time is 1926, please adjust your watches and expectations accordingly.*

*I mean, I secretly quite like it, but then I'm not a tenant so I take it on my own terms...

Posted by Snags (# 15351) on :

The only justification that even begins to approach coming remotely close to the merest edges of decency that I could think of for such a system would be to facilitate pastoral care co-ordination in a church that is sufficiently large for people to get lost in the crowd.

However, I'd still argue that rather than using technology cannily to facilitate the work of the church, it's more likely to indicate a failure of the church in encouraging attendees to actually be church.

So a hearty No vote from this pew. Of course, if they want to issue me with a really cool Celtic cross, free of charge, that happens to have an RFID chip in it, well ... they can still FRO [Smile]

Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on :

I've been told (but can't confirm) that a large Anglican church not so far from here in a swish-ish suburb uses swipe cards for attendees to clock-in, the data being used (among other things?) for awarding places at the associated CofE primary school.

[ 19. June 2015, 17:54: Message edited by: mark_in_manchester ]

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mark_in_manchester:
I've been told (but can't confirm) that a large Anglican church not so far from here in a swish-ish suburb uses swipe cards for attendees to clock-in, the data being used (among other things?) for awarding places at the associated CofE primary school.

I can't say why but that strikes me as deeply disturbing.

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :

What strikes me are the boundless opportunities there would be for gaming that particular system, if it exists.

Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :

It clearly cries out to be used in the plot of a murder mystery. "But here is Prof. Moriarity at St. Sulpice's, taking communion at the altar rail!"

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :

It already is the plot of quite a few real-life justice stories of my acquaintance.

As I've related before here, I've seen some people convicted largely on the basis of their mobile phone being located more or less within the vicinity of the crime; and others put in prison because their mobile phone was off at the time of the crime.

But I was meaning that the card system would be easy to game, more so than the face recognition one.

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :

quote:
Originally posted by frin:
It would if you did it without telling people you were doing it, but it would be okay to track attendance by individuals if you had declared that you do it (after all, you can keep a register at anything).

Ah, but according to this relevant, just-published article about Facebook not deploying photo-regonition technology in Europe,

quote:
In the UK, the Data Protection Act stipulates that we have to be informed when we are under camera surveillance and by whom. We also have the right to request any recorded images we feature in.

So I suggest all the local atheists pop along to their nearest megachurch one Sunday and then promptly request access to their mugshot.

Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on :

My eyes are the only facial recognition technology I need to track attendance.

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

Your car can't get clamped in France. Because when that started, activists just superglued any and every car clamp they saw.

I shouldn't like that, it looks like quenching a smoking reed. But I do.

Track my arse.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Zappa:

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
Church is a voluntary association, not a fucking employment contract.
You reckon?

For most of us, in terms of attending a particular building, yes.

Posted by Alogon (# 5513) on :

Aren't there now regulations in Britain against employees photographing children who in their care? (After all-- horrors-- someone might get off on them.) How do these churches get around that one?

Posted by Chorister (# 473) on :

If you're in the choir, you get to stand up at the front every service, where everyone can see you - so everyone knows if you bunk off one week anyway. Whenever I try it, I get 'Where were YOU last week?' So no need for facial recognition software for us!

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