Privacy group calls for moratorium on facial recognition technology

A privacy rights group told the Federal Trade Commission that the FTC should suspend facial recognition technology’s deployment by commercial users until privacy and other safeguard standards are developed.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, in comments to the FTC on Feb. 1, recommended the delayed deployment because it said facial recognition technologies can be used by strangers to determine a person's actual identity. The group said that “poses a risk to privacy and personal security.”

The FTC requested public comments on facial recognition, based on issues raised at an FTC public forum workshop on the technology.

The group also noted that some companies have adopted techniques more favorable to privacy, allowing users to control the image database,  while other companies’ technologies undermine privacy, by centrally maintaining the image database.

The privacy group had previously submitted a complaint to the FTC about Facebook's use of facial recognition technology to build what it called “a secret database” of Facebook users' biometric data and allowing the company to automatically tag users in photos.