Privacy advocates have given up on negotiating facial recognition rules

For more than a year now, privacy advocates have been working with the United States government and numerous leaders from the marketing and retail industries to find common ground on the commercial use of facial recognition technology. More specifically, the different groups have been trying to create a voluntary code of conduct for companies that use or want to use facial recognition technology in their business, with the Department of Commerce (DOC) overseeing the discussion. Sounds good, right?

Wrong. Last night, all nine of the privacy advocates announced that they’re withdrawing from the proceedings out of protest on the grounds that “people deserve more protection than they are likely to get in this forum.” The advocates go into much more detail about their reasoning behind the withdrawal in their official statement, which puts an end (temporarily) to sixteen months of talks.

That’s not exactly the kind of statement that indicates progress has been made, and considering that the advocates include representatives from respected consumer protection organizations such as the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you can be pretty sure that they were fighting hard to ensure that our privacy was being respected.

Apparently the source of contention was whether or not companies would require explicit consent from citizens before tracking them with their systems. The advocates argued that at the very least “people should be able to walk down a public street without fear that companies they’ve never heard of are tracking their every movement.” Obviously the industry representatives didn’t agree with that premise, and so the groups were unable to reach a mutual agreement.

Tracking customers and potential customers on the Internet is a multi-billion dollar business, and with technology reaching the point that a similar level of tracking can be achieved in the real world, marketers have been quick to implement such tracking systems. The adoption of facial recognition technology, however, has been slow due to privacy concerns. That’s what these discussions were meant to alleviate, but with the groups not being able to reach an agreement, it may be a while before we start seeing any Minority Report style marketing in stores.