Some uses of facial recognition technology raise significant concerns that would merit a swift government response, as expressed by a new report of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The paper recommends taking into account federal legislation and an executive order, as well as the attention of the courts, the private sector, civil society associations and other organisations working with facial recognition technology, providing guidance for the responsible development and deployment of the technology.

A powerful and increasingly used tool, facial recognition technology is useful for a wide range of verification and identification applications and offers capabilities to check if someone is who they say they are and identify a person in an image. The systems use trained artificial intelligence models to extract facial features and create a biometric template from an image, and then compare the template features with features from another image or set of images to produce a similarity score. According to the report, the accuracy and speed of these systems have advanced very rapidly in the last decade with the adoption of machine learning.

With few exceptions, the United States currently has no authoritative guidelines, regulations or laws to adequately address issues related to the use of facial recognition technology, the report details. It also states that, even if it does not necessarily violate the rights and obligations included in statutes or constitutional provisions, facial recognition technology may interfere with and substantially affect the values embodied in U.S. privacy, civil liberties and human rights commitments.

According to University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor Jennifer Mnookin, facial recognition technology creates new and complex legal challenges and raises a variety of different and unresolved legal issues. It also raises complicated social questions about privacy and public and private surveillance, given the very personal implications of the technology.

It is crucial for governments to address these issues and to make them a priority: failure to adopt policies and regulations on the development and use of facial recognition technology would effectively cede decision-making and rulemaking on these important issues of major public concern entirely to the private sector and the marketplace.

Facial recognition technology has been increasingly incorporated into everyday life, with a wide range of uses, the report states. Some of these uses are innocuous, such as allowing people to unlock their smartphones. But when applied broadly and without safeguards, technology can enable repressive regimes to create detailed records of people’s movements and activities and block citizens’ participation in public life. Many potential uses fall somewhere in between, creating a large grey area where individual assessments of risks, benefits, trade-offs and values may vary, thus affecting how they should be regulated or permitted. The report recognises the value of facial recognition technology and does not advocate a blanket ban, but states that a number of uses may cause sufficient concern to ban them.

The study says that there are two main categories of facial recognition concerns, although they may overlap. One is potential harms from problematic use or misuse of technology, which become more prominent as technology becomes more accurate and capable. The second is potential harms from errors or limitations of the technology itself, such as when systems have different false positive or false negative rates for different demographic groups.

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