A ban on facial recognition won’t make any difference if, in response, surveillance systems switch to identifying people by smartphone MAC addresses. Similarly, we need rules about how our data can be combined with other data, and then bought and sold without our knowledge or consent. The large internet surveillance companies like Facebook and Google collect dossiers on us more detailed than those of any police state of the previous century. When people can be identified and their data correlated at a speed and scale previously unseen, we need new rules. Today, facial recognition technologies are receiving the brunt of the tech backlash, but focusing on them misses the point.

Source: New York Times January 20, 2020 09:56 UTC