杏吧原创

Not just a face in a crowd (Image: Mark Leong/Redux/eyevine)

鈥淚f you are walking down the street, a public street, should a company be able to identify you without your permission?鈥�

That was the key question that caused talks among privacy advocates, the US government and consumer groups about face recognition technology to fall apart quite spectacularly earlier this week.

The series of were meant to develop a code of conduct for the use of this technology 鈥� but collapsed after in protest.

of the Georgetown University Law Centre in Washington DC says this happened in the face of complete inflexibility from industry players when trying to agree on correct conduct in the simple, hypothetical case above.

Bedoya and other privacy advocates thought the answer was obviously no, but the tech companies disagreed. 鈥淲e asked if we can agree on this edge case, but not a single company would support it,鈥� he says.

End of anonymity

The lack of consensus means face recognition is moving into creepy territory. One example is California-based company , which is rolling out a system for retailers that it says will 鈥渂oost sales by recognising high-value customers each time they shop鈥� and send 鈥渁lerts when known litigious individuals enter any of your locations鈥�.

鈥淲hat facial recognition allows is a world without anonymity,鈥� says Bedoya. 鈥淵ou walk into a car dealership and the salesman knows your name and how much you make. That鈥檚 not a world I want to live in.鈥�

Another company, called is marketing facial recognition systems for churches. Once the faces of a church鈥檚 membership have been added to a database, the system tracks their attendance automatically. It also claims to be able to discern demographic data about the entire congregation, including age and gender.

鈥淐ompanies are already marketing products that will let a stranger point a camera at you and identify you by name and by your dating profile,鈥� says Bedoya. 鈥淚 think most reasonable people would find this appalling.鈥�

Two-faced

Online technology companies that use facial recognition have had to think about their own policies for it. Google and Microsoft are known for having the best policies, requiring users to explicitly opt-in. In Microsoft鈥檚 case, your facial profile never leaves your device 鈥� for example, your Xbox.

But that did not translate into pushing for the same practices to become standard in the meetings.

鈥淢icrosoft takes an opt-in approach to facial recognition and we would encourage other companies to do the same,鈥� a spokesperson for the company told New 杏吧原创. 鈥淲e believe the stakeholder process is important and that is why we are participating. Should there be a consensus that an opt-in approach be adopted, that is something that we could support.鈥�

But no such consensus was reached.

Facing the music

While negotiating rules for face recognition has failed for now, , also of Georgetown, points out that the US states of Illinois and Texas, which comprise an eighth of the country鈥檚 population, already have privacy laws that govern the collection and processing of biometric data like faces.

Facebook is , where it is alleged that the social network鈥檚 face recognition system violates the state鈥檚 laws. Sobel and Bedoya suggest that state by state may be the best way to make progress in ensuring privacy from face recognition technology.

Why don鈥檛 the technology companies take these threats seriously? Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group based in San Francisco, says it鈥檚 because doing so would constrain what they can do with the technology in future.

Deeper discussion

鈥淲e鈥檝e seen this from the birth of commerce on the internet 鈥� companies collect as much data as they possibly can on people, because of the possibility that it might be useful,鈥� says Lynch. 鈥淲e discourage companies from doing that because it means all of that data is available for the government to come asking.鈥�

鈥淭his is just the beginning of a very important conversation,鈥� says Kate Crawford of Microsoft Research. 鈥淔acial recognition is one of many remote biometric sensing technologies. There鈥檚 also gait detection, iris scanning, heartbeat recognition and many others. We need a deeper discussion of the social and ethical implications of these capacities as well as who gets to use them, where and how.鈥�