I believe the EFF and the other consumer groups are grandstanding to get some publicity in this case. I have listened to almost all of these sessions that the NTIA facilitated, and the company I work for even presented at one of them last year. I think it's important to get some points out which I haven't seen in any of the other comments:

1. The process led by the NTIA, unlike the bulk of the EFF's post, has nothing to do with the government's collection and use of facial recognition data. This process was designed to come up with a voluntary guideline that commercial facial recognition companies could choose to adhere to or not. I agree that limits need to be set for government uses, but this process from the beginning was never about that. The NTIA did not have jurisdiction for anything involving the federal government, law enforcement, military, etc. This is more akin to the voluntary privacy standards that companies on the web will agree to on their own. Once they do, if they violate their own policy they are subject to sanction by the FTC. The guidelines coming out of this process were intended to be voluntary, so companies would not have to comply if they didn't want to. However, the idea was that the working group would come up with something that the industry would volunteer for and by doing so give some level of protection to consumers.

2. The industry representation was not opposed to opt-in on some scenarios, but they were opposed to mandatory positive opt-in across the board without exception. There are a number of scenarios where opt-in doesn't make sense. For example, imagine a system that used facial recognition in a retail setting to detect shoplifters and alert management to their presence. If you had been caught stealing in the store in the past, you would be enrolled into the system by the retailer. Each person entering the store (as seen on their already existing surveillance systems) would be checked against that database of shoplifters. How realistic would it be for the retailer to get written opt-in consent from the criminal?

3. Previous sessions the consumer advocates had agreed that facial detection was out of scope, but facial recognition and facial analysis were in scope for the guideline. At the last session, they changed their position and wanted to bring face detection in scope. The difference being, face detection is just finding a face in an image, like your smartphone does in the camera app vs face recognition which would be finding the identity of a face in a picture (Who is this? or is this Bob?). Can you imagine getting opt-in consent to draw this little yellow box around the faces in the camera app?

4. The NTIA did an outstanding job in an attempt to bring this process together. They organized the sessions and brought in numerous speakers from both sides (consumer and industry) as well as from the education and research sectors. We even had representation from Canada that spoke to a similar process they went through there. The NTIA wasn't forcing any standards on anyone, they simply offered their services to organize and facilitate it as they have done in other similar multi-stakeholder initiatives. The process went on far longer than the NTIA (and any of the participants) had expected, but it was making slow progress.

I don't know if this process is now dead or not. I suspect it will go on, just now the consumer groups won't have a voice in shaping this (by their own choice), which is a shame. It's also possible that the show of force by the consumer advocates will push the industry to bend more in their favor, either way it would be good for consumers to get some kind of guideline out there. It could always evolve and be revisited in the future as the technology changes.