Nine privacy groups to withdraw from talks over facial recognition

Nine privacy groups plan to withdraw from US government-hosted negotiations to develop voluntary facial-recognition privacy standards as they feel the process would not lead to adequate privacy protections.

Industry representatives at the talks had been calling to limit consumer control over the facial recognition data collected, the groups said in a letter to be released today.

''We are convinced that in many contexts, facial recognition should only occur when an individual has affirmatively decided to allow it to occur,'' wrote the groups, including the Center for Digital Democracy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Consumer Action. ''Industry stakeholders were unable to agree on any concrete scenario where companies should employ facial recognition only with a consumer's permission.''

The talks, hosted by the US National Telecommunication and Information Administration, got underway in February 2014 and participants had invested around 40 hours of work in 11 meetings, said Alvaro Bedoya, executive director at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, which too was withdrawing from the negotiations.

The nine groups withdrawing from the talks represented all the major privacy and consumer groups that were taking part.

NTIA was disappointed that some participants had withdrawn from the talks, according to the agency. ''Up to this point, the process has made good progress as many stakeholders, including privacy advocates, have made substantial, constructive contributions to the group's work,'' an agency spokeswoman was quoted as saying in an email.

The consumer groups that left the talks believe companies like Facebook need to get individuals' permission before their images could be identified using increasingly advanced facial recognition technology.

According to Jeffrey Chester, with the Center for Digital Democracy, one of the groups, this was not just one's anonymous online profile. It was one's face they were tracking.
Facial recognition software is capable of automatically identifying individuals in a digital image by comparing facial features in the image and a database. It allowed computers to link a person's name to their face in photos or video.

The discussion was being organised by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a division of the Department of Commerce and as part of the process, industry and privacy groups had been meeting for 18 months to create a voluntary code of conduct around the use of facial recognition software in commercial contexts.

The NTIA had been successful in creating a voluntary code for mobile apps last year.