The new fad of face recognition in smartphones has grown immensely. And why not? It is a major convenience. But did you know that face recognition tech infringes on your privacy? Yes, companies can use these to tag you in their photos without your approval. Not only that, it is a dangerous tool of surveillance that is being used by many countries. This may be used by many more in the near future.

“If we move too fast with facial recognition, we may find that people’s fundamental rights are being broken,” Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote in a blog post last week. He calling for transparency, regulation and corporate responsibility with this technology.

How would you feel if at a public gathering a police officer comes up to each attendee and asks for their identification? The police officer must suspect you of a crime when he asks for your proof of innocence. That would feel outrageous to any normal human being. To be subjected to such treatment at invalid locations and for invalid reasons. But face-scanning cameras do just that. They scan every man, woman and child without any prior suspicion of wrongdoing. They compare them against the profiles of criminals and people wanted by the police. This is how severely face recognition tech infringes on your privacy.

In China, face-scanning surveillance is deployed by the government. Cameras scan and check the faces of passersby against a national database of names, ages and ethnicities. The system can inform authorities about everywhere you have been over the past few days, and everyone you may have met.

And what happens if a system like this gets it wrong? A mistake by a video-based surveillance system may mean an innocent person is followed, investigated, and maybe even arrested and charged for a crime he or she didn’t commit. A mistake by a face-scanning surveillance system on a body camera could be lethal. An officer alerted to a potential threat to public safety or to himself, must, in an instant, decide whether to draw his weapon. A false alert places an innocent person in those crosshairs.