Not feeling in control of personal data: Americans and Majorities think their personal data is less secure now, that data collection poses more risks than benefits, and believe it is not possible to go through daily life without being tracked.

It allows for fast, contactless screening of body temperature in various non-medical environments. The thermal imaging/sensing application uses MEMS technologies: notably for thermal imaging, microbolometers are used and for simple temperature sensing/detection (no imaging function), thermopiles are used. Both of these devices are based on MEMS technologies.

SyRI may process everything you have ever shared with the government about your identity, labor, personal estates and property, education, pension, business, income and assets, pension and debts. And the list does not stop there.

But the evidence suggests thermal cameras are far from a perfect solution, offering limited accuracy if set up incorrectly, and raising data privacy concerns.

We as humans are creating an enormous invisible network on top of our existing biosphere; the infosphere. This infosphere consists of networks and radiowaves. It’s our new, ever expanding environment that grows at a staggering rate. Yet we roam around unprotected with privacy sensitive data. This data might easily be tracked and misused by virtually everyone; random people, but also companies and governments. It has become impossible to control which information about us is revealed and what stays hidden. We are not in control of our own privacy anymore. And privacy is what makes us human.

With the final design completed I created some mock mask designs to test how they were evaluated by the HOG facial detection. Initial results seemed promising. The above design consistently returned 4–5 falsely detected faces.

For example, the UK police are implementing facial recognition to monitor protests and soccer matches; the Dutch government is being sued for SyRI, a risk-scoring algorithm that is targeting the poor; and the Polish Ministry of Labour and Social Policy introduced a controversial system that profiles unemployed people to determine the type of assistance that a person can obtain from local labour offices.

Users are encouraged to flaunt their good credit scores to friends, and even potential mates. China's biggest matchmaking service, Baihe, has teamed up with Sesame to promote clients with good credit scores, giving them prominent spots on the company's website.

Credit scores already control our finances. With personal data being increasingly trawled, our politics and our friendships will be next.

Predictive policing algorithms are becoming common practice in cities across the US. Though lack of transparency makes exact statistics hard to pin down, PredPol, a leading vendor, boasts that it helps protect 1 in 33 Americans. The software is often touted as a way to help thinly stretched police departments make more efficient, data-driven decisions.

Systems for automated decision-making or decision support (ADM) are on the rise in EU countries: Profiling job applicants based on their personal emails in Finland, allocating treatment for patients in the public health system in Italy, sorting the unemployed in Poland, automatically identifying children vulnerable to neglect in Denmark, detecting welfare fraud in the Netherlands, credit scoring systems in many EU countries – the range of applications has broadened to almost all aspects of daily life.

The massive infrastructure required to run face recognition (such as cameras, software, and open-ended contracts with vendors) cannot be easily dismantled when the public health crisis is over.

In 100 years from now, we’re going to have a similar transformation of fashion and the way that we appear. What will that look like? Hopefully it will look like something that appears to optimise our personal privacy.