Facial Recognition & Privacy: An EU-US Perspective

Facial recognition is increasingly used in a variety of contexts – from photo tagging on social networking sites to targeting advertisements in stores or public places to security and authentication – but the technology poses complex privacy issues.

Facial recognition and other automated systems collecting sensitive information about individuals in public places have the potential to significantly alter the ways in which individuals are identified, tracked and marketed to. The privacy issues associated with facial recognition are compounded by the wide availability of this powerful technology.

This report looks at the state of facial recognition technology here in US and the EU and provides some guidelines to unjust and addresses some of the privacy concerns found in the technology today.