Facial Recognition Goes to Summer Camp

A new service is letting parents more efficiently keep tabs on their kids while they’re away at summer camp, with biometric technology.

Summer camps tend to employ staff photographers whose job is to snap pictures of the good times being enjoyed by their clients’ kids, which are subsequently posted on camp websites or Facebook pages, or sent to parents directly. But for some camps this can add up to hundreds of photos per day, meaning parents need to wade through a lot of images to find their kids.

Waldo Photos solves that problem using facial recognition technology. Interested parents who are willing to pay between one and two dollars a day can submit a headshot of their child to the service, which is then scanned and used to automatically flag photos in which their kids are featured. Those photos are then texted directly to the parents, potentially saving them a lot of time and hassle.

While there has been growing controversy over government and police agencies’ use of facial recognition for public surveillance, Waldo Photos’ system is entirely voluntary, and uses a two-step verification process to ensure that it’s a child’s actual parents signing up for the service. It also offers a security feature that allows parents to flag and automatically delete their children’s photos in cases where parents want to ensure their child’s anonymity at summer camp.

Waldo Photos says its system is currently being used at over a hundred camps across 33 states, and that it’s working to expand its availability to sports teams and schools.

Sources: USA Today, Citizen Times

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July 18, 2018 – by Alex Perala