"We’re Banning Facial Recognition. We’re Missing the Point.", 20 January 2020

Communities across the United States are starting to ban facial recognition technologies... Forty major music festivals pledged not to use the technology, and activists are calling for a nationwide ban. Many Democratic presidential candidates support at least a partial ban on the technology... Focusing on one particular identification method misconstrues the nature of the surveillance society we’re in the process of building. Ubiquitous mass surveillance is increasingly the norm... [M]odern mass surveillance has three broad components: identification, correlation and discrimination... Facial recognition is a technology that can be used to identify people without their knowledge or consent... The whole purpose of this process is for companies — and governments — to treat individuals differently... The problem is that we are being identified without our knowledge or consent, and society needs rules about when that is permissible... 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 data broker industry is almost entirely unregulated... Finally, we need better rules about when and how it is permissible for companies to discriminate.