As bills like this move forward, the specifics begin to be debated and trialed. Can landlords use face rec? Can stadiums? What about banks, who have perhaps a more pressing ‘security concern’ argument? What about corner stores, supermarkets, and 7/11s, who also arguably have security concerns? And then you have law enforcement and governments, where using face rec is a separate but parallel issue to debate as well.

Working in this field, you inevitably have these discussions with everyone - I really cannot overstate how ubiquitous these discussions really are. And from those ubiquitous discussions, I have distilled what I think is the central question: do you have the right to not be recognized?

Take the hypothetical example of a repeat shoplifter (assume previously convicted, etc). Stores reserve the right to refuse service, and in my discussions, refusing service to a repeat shoplifter was generally uncontroversial. If the store owner is on the till, recognizes the shoplifter, and refuses them service, people were generally okay with that (so you could say people seem to feel that there’s no “right to not be recognized” on the most local scale).

If the store owner puts up a picture behind the counter so that all employees of that store are able to recognize the shoplifter and refuse service, people were generally okay with that too, although you start to see a few (largely ideological) dissenters at this step.

What about if it’s a chain of stores and they have an efficient system of propagating those images, so the shoplifter is refused service at every shop in that chain? This is where people start to get uncomfortable. How about retail consortiums operating a system like this, such that most stores can recognize the shoplifter and refuse them entry? By this point people are split about 50/50 (quite different than you might have expected, but that’s what I observed). And you can keep ratcheting up the pervasiveness and effectiveness to see where peoples’ support drops off (so maybe they feel there should be some sort of non-local “right to not be recognized”).

Then you can move laterally. Another useful hypothetical: a retired police officer, who’s now a manager and doing hiring interviews, recognizes one of the interviewees as someone they have previously arrested (assume that it was for a crime that would be relevant to the job being hired for, and the person was convicted). Can they use that information to color their perception of the interviewee (note we aren’t using felony records, just personal knowledge)? What about if it was someone their colleagues had arrested? If they recognized the person from an APB or similar bulletin circulated among police stations? What about if the ex-cop is instead a bodyguard, can they be suspicious of a person because they recognize them from their time in law enforcement?

Overall, I think it is similar to the “right to be forgotten” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten). You can’t compel an individual to forget some information they know about another individual, but (the argument goes) the internet and search engines have made that information, in some sense, too permanent and too easily accessible, far beyond the capability of unaided human memory. Facial recognition technology, by automating and scaling recognizability so far beyond the capacity of unaided humans, may have the same issue and may need similar laws.

(I should note I’m not really trying to put forward a legal theory here, I have just found that face rec discussions tended to very easily tangent into non-core objections and get bogged down in the specifics of each case being discussed, and this framing seemed to keep it on topic.)