Facial Recognition Is Here But We Have No Laws

Without legal safeguards, this technology will undermine democratic values and fundamental rights.

At protests against police violence across the country, law enforcement authorities have deployed the tanks, tear gas and military equipment that they have at their disposal. Americans have gotten a look at a more insidious police capability: facial recognition systems with the ability to identify faces in a crowd and track people as they move through the world.

As devotees of any police procedural drama will know, law enforcement agencies have used facial identification software for years, finding suspects caught on security cameras in databases of mugshot photos. But in recent years, software for identifying faces has improved dramatically, high-definition cameras have proliferated to near-ubiquity, and the facial databases that police can access have expanded far beyond the mugshots of convicted felons