“In the 2002 film Minority Report, Steven Spielberg imagined a world in which companies use biometric technology to identify us and serve us targeted ads. Ten years later, that vision is coming closer to reality. Having overcome the high costs and poor accuracy that once stunted its growth, one form of biometric technology – facial recognition – is quickly moving out of the realm of science fiction and into the commercial marketplace.
Today, companies are deploying facial recognition technologies in a wide array of contexts, reflecting a spectrum of increasing technological sophistication. At the simplest level, the technology can be used for facial detection; that is, merely to detect and locate a face in a photo. Current uses of facial detection include refining search engine results to include only those results that contain a face; locating faces in images in order to blur them; ensuring that the frame for a video chat feed actually includes a face; or developing virtual eyeglass fitting systems and virtual makeover tools that allow consumers to upload their photos online and ‘try on’ a pair of glasses or a new hairstyle.”
(U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Report,
Facing Facts: Best Practices for Common Uses of Facial Recognition Technologies)
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For those who have seen the Tom Cruise film Minority Report, you will surely remember the scene where Tom Cruise cruises through Gap and gets targeted ads directed at him. I can’t quite recall if this was an accelerated version of geo targeted advertising or facial recognition (or be sure that I could decode the technology in any event).
In any event, that was the first thing that came to mind when I saw that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has just published a new staff report yesterday on advertising and privacy issues connected to facial recognition technologies – called: Facing Facts: Best Practices for Common Uses of Facial Recognition Technologies – and sure enough the lead-in to the report describes facial recognition technology, like that depicted in Minority Report, becoming a reality.
In issuing the new report, the FTC said:
“The Federal Trade Commission today released a staff report “Facing Facts: Best Practices for Common Uses of Facial Recognition Technologies” for the increasing number of companies using facial recognition technologies, to help them protect consumers’ privacy as they use the technologies to create innovative new commercial products and services.
Facial recognition technologies have been adopted in a variety of contexts, ranging from online social networks and mobile apps to digital signs, the FTC staff report states. They have a number of potential uses, such as determining an individual’s age range and gender in order to deliver targeted advertising; assessing viewers’ emotions to see if they are engaged in a video game or a movie; or matching faces and identifying anonymous individuals in images.
Facial recognition also has raised a variety of privacy concerns because – for example – it holds the prospect of identifying anonymous individuals in public, and because the data collected may be susceptible to security breaches and hacking.”
The FTC’s new report makes a number of recommendations for companies utilizing facial recognition technologies for advertising including designing services with consumer privacy in mind; developing reasonable security protections for information collected (and policies for determining what information to keep and discard); and evaluating the sensitivity of information when developing facial recognition related products (e.g., digital signs that use facial recognition technology is recommended not to be set up in places where children may be targeted).
The report also makes a number of other recommendations, including in relation to notice, disclosure (i.e., what data will be collected and how it will be used), choice to participate (or opt out) and affirmative consent in some cases.
Given that there is also increasing debate in Canada regarding the application (and evolution) of Canadian advertising and privacy laws to new technologies, including geo targeting, wireless and other mobile devices and new ways to utilize social media), it will be interesting to see whether this recent FTC initiative, and other similar ones by U.S. enforcement agencies, are followed in Canada by the Privacy Commissioner, Competition Bureau or others.
At the moment, however, the story in Canada is that traditional competition, advertising and privacy laws generally apply, with a great many uncertainties, gray areas and unknowns as to how these rules apply to technologies that, as usual, continue to outpace lawmakers.
For a copy of the FTC’s report see: Facing Facts: Best Practices for Common Uses of Facial Recognition Technologies.
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