The work of Aznarte, Melendo Pardos, and Lacruz López is an uncomfortable text in the best sense: it forces us to pause amid the technological enthusiasm and ask what is being compromised when the university delegates the surveillance of its students to algorithms.
Drawing on the case of the UNED, the authors expose the legal, ethical, and social cracks in facial recognition technologies, especially when introduced under the pressure of urgency, as happened during the pandemic. The notion that technology guarantees the integrity of examinations is revealed here as a mirage—one that shifts the problem of human trust onto an opaque machinery, as fallible as the people who built it.
This analysis is more than a technical critique; it is a reflection on the model of university currently being constructed. The UNED, a symbol of distance education, becomes a testing ground for a global trend toward the automation of assessment. The authors show that facial recognition not only processes data but also enforces a form of power: a gaze that classifies, suspects, and standardizes.
Beneath their diagnosis runs a deeper warning about the shrinking room for error, difference, and ambiguity (elements essential to any living educational process). Surveillance, when disguised as efficiency, ends up eroding the trust on which every pedagogical relationship depends.
From this study arise fertile lines of inquiry: how to design assessment systems that maintain reliability without turning the student into an object of control; how to build collective decision-making mechanisms around technological adoption; and, above all, how to reimagine institutional ethics in a time when data seem to dictate truth.
Rather than a call to reject technology, this article offers a different way of thinking about it—not as a tool of suspicion, but as a space for care. That may well be the most enduring lesson from the UNED experience.
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How to Cite: Aznarte, J. L., Melendo Pardo, M., & Lacruz López, J. M. (2022). On the Use of Facial Recognition Technologies in University: the UNED Case. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 25(1), 261–277. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.25.1.31533
