Facial recognition software vendor — Face-Six — has recently entered the church market with their Churchix product, and we had the chance to speak with the company’s CEO Moshe Greenshpan about what drove them to the church world.
Operating in a high-end security market for several years, what brings you to the church market?
The truth is we were unaware of any church market, let alone had any plans to hit this market, until product orders started piling up. Within a short period of time we’ve been approached by 10 different churches from all over the world, all asking for the same thing – give us a face recognition software that can identify members attending our events.
What’s so special about event attendance?
Church events are the church way to interact with its members, and naturally the attendance to those events is very important. Event attendance stats help the church to measure the success of each event, see what event types are more popular than others and also track the attendance of specific members.
What about invasion to privacy?
Well that’s a good question. It’s important to understand that churches already manually track their members’ attendance. We just provide automatic and efficient way of tracking attendance using face recognition technology. We encourage churches to set up Churchix in a registration checkpoint where members are voluntary registering themselves by just looking at a camera. The church can offer members different incentives that will happily make them look at the camera.
What are the reactions to Churchix?
Reactions are simply overwhelming. Churches we spoke with are saying it’s like a dream come through. Imagine the effort required to manually track the attendance of 100 or 500 members. Try to manually track and register 1,000 members – It’s almost impossible. With Churchix it’s a piece of cake.
How does Churchix work?
Churchix is a desktop application which you can download and start using immediately. It allows the church to enroll its members’ photos into the software data base, and connect a live camera or upload pre-recorded video files or photos for face recognition matching.
Each face appearing in front of the camera is extracted and being matched against the pre-enrolled members. Churchix displays the matches in real-time and allows the church to manually override matches in case of a wrong identity.
How accurate is Churchix?
In a controlled environment Churchix’s accuracy reaches 99%. Of course, real life is not a controlled environment, but if you follow our recommendations accuracy is pretty impressive.
What are the important accuracy factors?
You need to make sure you have good quality photos for enrolling your members, and that your lighting conditions are good in the camera’s range. You also need to make sure your members face and look at the direction of the camera.
Do you have any plans to develop other products for churches?
Well, we are a face recognition software company so we don’t have any plans to develop products which are not in our domain.
See Churchix in action:
Josh Byers says
Are we ready for this? Even in a society where privacy is not considered the norm, the sanctuary is still viewed as sacred and safe. I’m think this will take a little while longer to catch on.
As a pastor in charge of assimilation however, I am drooling over the prospects of actually having our people and larger public on board. Connect this to a Google Glass type piece of hardware that shows each person’s name as I look at them? Yes please.
David Hellsten says
This can’t be real, surely – please tell me it’s satire…
B. T. says
I wish it was satire, but the story is showing up everywhere.
It’s very disturbing when churches adopt technologies that could conceivably be part of the ‘beast system’. Wouldn’t tracking be one of the main reasons for marking individuals?
And when you tithe, are you comfortable with your money going toward useless gadgets? What happened to using that money to actually help those in need?
I stopped attending church when it became a multimedia event, and coffee mugs were advertised during service. People seem to be quickly losing a grip on what’s important.
Mark Cox says
This is very worrying.
I would like to think that I could attend / not attend a specific Church event for valid reasons.
If statistics and/or numbers need to be gathered then they should anonymised into totals not personalised to individual attendance.
What does this open the door to? Monitoring of people who do not sing/pray enough, agree with the preacher enough or don’t put enough into the weekly offering.
Feedback should by invitation only not enforced by silent consent. Are the congregations given an exception option not to be tracked or can they sign a consent form?
Charles says
The responses I have read on this and other sites should a degree of paranoid ignorance that is astonishing. Face book applies FR to the entire world no complains, a church does so on their own private property and its the anti-Christ, lol.
FR is currently used by many secular companies for attendance tracking, visitor management, and security alarms, etc. Churches have the exact same processes that need to be managed.
Additionally, if you walk into a church and the pastor looks at you and recognizes your face and associates it with your name. THAT’S FACIAL RECOGNITION. That’s been happening for decades.
Finally churches are private property. If you don’t like FR at a church DON’T GO THERE!!! Most of the people crying about this topic are not even parishioners anywhere.
David Hellsten says
I just wonder why a church would need to have this kind of registration of who is there. As a pastor of a small church, I obviously notice who is there and who isn’t; but that’s quite different from registering everybody on a computer.
I don’t think it has anything to do with Antichrist; I just think it’s disrespectful and smacks of some kind of ecclesiastical Big Brother.
Charles says
David Hellsten, I too pastor a small church of about 700 and there are many reasons that a church could legitimately use this type of technology.
1. If my greeters could see the names of the people as they come to the door they could address each family by their actual names instead of something generic, making the greeting much more personal. This would also help the greeters to learn the actual names of the parishioners.
2. by comparing the names of the people who attended over several weeks, One can determine those congregants that have missed several weeks and determine if they are recovering addicts, or domestic violence victims, etc and take proper action.
3. There are people who can not come on the property due to restraining orders, criminal trespass warnings, etc that this type of system could immediately alert security.
4. We are able to record our actual active congregants for budgeting or planning reasons and not just names of inactive people that have been ion the church over the past year or more
5. If an incident ever occurred on the property, we would know EXACTLY who is on property and if anyone is missing
In short the church has the exact same problems of any business that deals with the public, and it is irresponsible for church leaders to do nothing in these type of scenarios, if the tools exist to help them address them. I am only waiting for FR prices to become more affordable and I would install it in a heartbeat, but not as a “big brother” tool but rather a tool to better serve.
One other thought, many people seem to think the FR is about addressing people who did NOT come to church a given week, I see it more about better serving those who DO come to church.
David Hellsten says
Thanks – very good answer! I see your point, and I guess in a church that big, it might be useful for those purposes. I have 45-50 people in church on a Sunday morning, and I know all the regulars (and quite a few irregulars) by name. I can’t quite imagine a church with 700 people…
Janet says
I agree! Don’t go there!