Consumers’ use and acceptance of biometric technology—especially facial recognition—varies widely, depending on which part of the world you’re in.
In the US and many parts of the West, facial recognition systems—including those from Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook—have sparked intense consumer debate and are under heavy fire from privacy advocates for their ability to scan people’s faces and identify them without their consent.
Legal challenges, including high-profile lawsuits against these tech giants, make headlines almost daily, and have already forced some companies to reverse course. In June 2019, Microsoft quietly deleted a massive online data set that contained more than 10 million images of 100,000 individuals that was used to train other companies’ facial recognition systems. And last month, Facebook, facing heavy fines over its use of facial recognition in photo tagging, announced it would ask its users’ permission to use the feature and delete their “face recognition template” if they did not opt in.
The use of biometrics and other personal data has also given rise to a host of new regulations in the West. For example, the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) prevents the “processing” and sharing of biometric data without permission. In the US, the states of Illinois, Washington and Texas have passed biometric privacy laws that impose restrictions on organizations that collect biometric information. In California, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) regulates biometric data, and the cities of Oakland and San Francisco have banned municipal authorities from using facial recognition.
In China, there are fewer such concerns. The country’s large population, communist government and sociocultural mores tell a different story. A September 2018 survey by Deloitte found that the use of facial recognition and other technologies in China had grown significantly from the previous year. Some 44% of smartphone users reported using the technology, up from just 18% in 2017. The use of fingerprint and speech recognition also jumped.