Banning Facial Recognition Misses the Point ⇥ nytimes.com

Bruce Schneier, in an op-ed for the New York Times:

Regulating this system means addressing all three steps of the process. A ban on facial recognition won’t make any difference if, in response, surveillance systems switch to identifying people by smartphone MAC addresses. The problem is that we are being identified without our knowledge or consent, and society needs rules about when that is permissible.

Similarly, we need rules about how our data can be combined with other data, and then bought and sold without our knowledge or consent. The data broker industry is almost entirely unregulated; there’s only one law — passed in Vermont in 2018 — that requires data brokers to register and explain in broad terms what kind of data they collect. The large internet surveillance companies like Facebook and Google collect dossiers on us more detailed than those of any police state of the previous century. Reasonable laws would prevent the worst of their abuses.

Finally, we need better rules about when and how it is permissible for companies to discriminate. Discrimination based on protected characteristics like race and gender is already illegal, but those rules are ineffectual against the current technologies of surveillance and control. When people can be identified and their data correlated at a speed and scale previously unseen, we need new rules.

This is a timely article — not only because of the publicity Clearview AI has received, but also because the European Commission is considering a ban on the use of facial recognition in public, as London’s Metropolitan Police have announced they will be using widely.