Face Recognition Row Over Right to Identify You in the Street

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"If you are walking down the street, a public street, should a company be able to identify you without your permission?"

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 US government agency talks were meant to develop a code of conduct for the use of this technology – but collapsed after all the privacy advocates stormed out in protest.

Alvaro Bedoya 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. "We asked if we can agree on this edge case, but not a single company would support it," he says.

End of anonymity

The lack of consensus means face recognition is moving into creepy territory. One example is California-based company Face First...