Amid Controversy, Facial Recognition Guidelines Offered By Industry

Facial recognition software could, for example, identify shoppers who are likely to spend money, and on what. It’s a technology that alarms many privacy advocates. Formal discussions to establish some parameters, convened in 2014 by an agency within the Department of Commerce, managed to bring to the table representatives from industry and many of those privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union. But things went awry and the privacy side walked out. “We started getting the sense that a lot of the representatives on the other side weren’t there to cut a deal and were instead there to stop a deal from happening,” said one former attendee,  the executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University Law Center. Later this month the remaining participants are expected to release draft guidelines that address issues of disclosure (that is, a requirement that people be told they are being watched and “recognized’), the sharing of garnered information (who else will be able to get it), and the security (vis a vis hacks) of any data being held. But these guidelines are advisory and voluntary only, and they don’t address what privacy advocates consider the major issue: whether businesses will need to ask for permission to gather the data in the first place.