For the past year, I've been extolling the benefits of facial recognition technology.
Simply put, it's coming whether you like it or not...
And really, you should like it.
I know there are concerns, and they're valid.
No one wants to live in a dystopian society where every individual is tracked and followed.
But that's not what this is.
What we're talking about is a technology that when deployed properly - with care towards personal data protection - is extremely valuable, and even life-saving.
That is the conclusion many individuals, businesses, and governments have reached.
And there's no going back from here. The technology is only moving forward.
Most recently, Lockport, a small city in New York, deployed facial recognition technology at each of its eight schools.
Some parents made a fuss about it - one even writing an op-ed in the New York Times. But in the end, the district reached the same conclusion I just alluded to.
Namely, the benefits outweigh the concerns.
The schools now use hundreds of hidden cameras and a database of photos to scan the throngs of students for weapons and persons of interest.
Who's a person of interest?
Known criminals, sex offenders, former school employees, and people prohibited from seeing students by restraining orders, mostly.
It also includes students who have been expelled.
That's important, because as Robert LiPuma, the Lockport City School District's director of technology, pointed out, the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was carried out by a student who had been expelled.
"You had an expelled student that would have been put into the system, because they were not supposed to be on school grounds," LiPuma told the NYT. "They snuck in through an open door. The minute they snuck in, the system would have identified that person."
That's how the system works.
If a person on the list is detected, the system sends an alert to one of 14 part- and full-time security personnel hired by Lockport. The human monitor then looks at a picture of the person in question to "confirm" or "reject" a match with the person on the camera.
If the operator rejects the match, the alert is dismissed. If the match is confirmed, another alert goes out to a handful of district administrators, who decide what action to take.
And, as I mentioned, the technology can also scan for guns.
If a gun is detected and confirmed by the human monitor, an alert automatically goes out to both administrators and the police department.
And if the police can't reach anyone at the school to confirm the threat, it gets treated as a live situation.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the technology that's going to stop, or at least inhibit school shootings.