After more than a year of discussions, all nine privacy advocates have stormed out of a government-organized “multi-stakeholder process” to sort out details around the best practices for facial recognition technology.
The sticking point was that corporations apparently refused to concede that there was any scenario during which a person’s consent to scan their face was needed.
“When we came in [last] Thursday, [we proposed] that in general, there will be exceptions, but the default for identifying unknown people is that you get permission before you identify them using facial recognition,” Alvaro Bedoya, one of the nine participating advocates and a law professor at Georgetown University, told Ars. “Not a single trade association or company would agree with that premise. That’s remarkable. Google is opt-in on facial recognition, Microsoft is opt-in on facial recognition, Facebook isn’t, but they’ve gotten sued and also had to turn it off in Europe. So not only does it go against state law, it goes against industry practice. Consumers deserve more.”
Bedoya is specifically referring to the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). Facebook was sued in April 2015 by a Chicago man, alleging that he and others in Illinois had their rights violated by Facebook as they did not give their express permission for facial recognition. Texas also has a similar law on the books.
As the privacy group wrote in a statement released late Monday evening:
At a base minimum, people should be able to walk down a public street without fear that companies they’ve never heard of are tracking their every movement—and identifying them by name—using facial recognition technology. Unfortunately, we have been unable to obtain agreement even with that basic, specific premise. The position that companies never need to ask permission to use biometric identification is at odds with consumer expectations, current industry practices, as well as existing state law.
We can't do opt-in because you might be a shoplifter
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