Diksha Sundriyal
The second season of Netflix’s ‘The Night Agent’ throws Peter Sutherland into another tricky case where he cannot afford to trust the wrong person. The only one he can place his blind faith in is Rose Larkin, with whom he developed a close bond following their shared trauma in the first season. The beginning of Season 2 shows Peter deep into his work as a Night Agent while Rose is off in California trying to rebuild her career. The last time she met Peter, she told him she wanted to build her own company, but now, we see her working for a company called AdVerse, which is working on something that could change the game for anyone who gets their hands on its technology. Considering what Rose is able to do with it, concerns about the use of facial recognition are natural to crop up. SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Fictional AdVerse Reflects the Real Scope of Facial Recognition Technology
AdVerse in ‘The Night Agent’ is a fictional app that Rose uses to find Peter and other people. She develops its code, which gives her the freedom to change it up or refine it to focus on what she wants. The ease with which she is able to find Peter and his enemies is impressive but also scary. This means that whoever has access to AdVerse’s services will be able to find whomever they want, and that could have serious repercussions for national security, to say the least. So far, no app with the functionality of AdVerse has been revealed to the public, but the use of facial recognition by government agencies, like the FBI, is not unheard of.
While the use of facial recognition might seem to ease things for government agencies, it also raises a ton of ethical questions, something that Rose, too, points out to her employer. While she is using the app, she knows that it is for the right reasons and nothing bad is going to happen because of it. However, when her employer finds out how far they can take the app with the changes that Rose has made to it, he becomes excited about selling it to the government or anyone who pays the highest price for it. His excitement worries Rose, and for the right reasons. One of the most well-known facial recognition technologies used by the authorities comes from Clearview AI, Inc., an American company that has several law enforcement agencies on its list of customers.
It uses the database of billions of images from the Internet to find a match and produce desired results for the user. So far, the technology is only restricted to government agencies where only vetted professionals have access to it. Still, concerns have been raised about the tech, especially when it comes to privacy rights. The company has been fined several times by several international organizations, with some even banning the use of the tech. Clearview also came under scrutiny in 2020 when it experienced a data breach that raised questions about its security. With AdVerse, Rose offers similar inhibitions. When her boss decides to develop the app further, the first thing she demands is an ethical committee to ensure that the app is used with proper protocols and is not used by bad people to serve their evil plans.
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