Face recognition is being banned, but it’s still everywhere

In November, voters in Bellingham, Washington, passed a ballot measure banning government use of face recognition technology. It added to a streak of such laws that started with San Francisco in 2019 and now number around two dozen.

The spread of such bans has inspired hope from campaigners and policy experts of a turn against an artificial intelligence technology that can lead to invasions of privacy or even wrongful arrest. Such feelings got a boost when Facebook unexpectedly announced on the day of the Bellingham vote that it would shutter its own face recognition system for identifying people in photos and videos, due to “growing societal concerns.”

Yet a few months earlier and about 100 miles from Bellingham, the commission that runs Seattle-Tacoma International Airport passed its own face recognition restrictions that leave airlines free to use the technology for functions like bag drop and check in, although it promised to provide some oversight and barred the technology’s use by port police. SeaTac is one of 200 US airports where US Customs and Border Protection uses face recognition to check traveler identities.

At least seven states adopted face recognition to verify the identity of people applying for assistance such as unemployment benefits. Even Facebook’s headline-grabbing shutdown of its face recognition features came with a caveat: The company said it will retain the underlying technology, because it might be useful in the future as a way to unlock devices or secure financial services.

This is the paradox of face recognition in 2021: The technology is banned in some places but increasingly normalized in others. That’s likely to continue, because face recognition is unregulated in most of the US, as there’s no federal law covering the technology.

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Many uses of face recognition have lower stakes than in policing; some, like unlocking a phone with a glance, can be seductively convenient. Despite concerns about the consequences of errors and evidence that some systems perform less well on people of color, the technology has become easy for non-tech companies to access and is generally reliable if deployed with care. A 2019 report by the National Institute for Standards and Technology said the majority of commercial algorithms tested showed unequal performance on different demographics, but also that any differences were minimal or undetectable for some of the most accurate and widely used algorithms.

Apple’s Face ID phone unlock system may be the most widely deployed and used face recognition system, but US airports are forerunners in normalizing its use in public spaces and interactions with the government.

CBP first deployed the technology in 2016 in partnership with Delta Air Lines at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta to check the identity of people boarding international flights. The program has steadily expanded since, but it accelerated in 2021, in part because the agency determined that touchless technology was more valuable during a pandemic.

At the end of 2020, CBP had implemented face recognition gates for incoming travelers at 17 airports. This year it added the technology at 182 airports, which the agency estimates will cover 99 percent of inbound air travel to the US. The program stems from legislation passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks requiring biometric identity checks for anyone entering or exiting the US. Facial recognition is used to check outgoing international travelers at 32 US airports. CBP says it has processed more than 100 million travelers using face recognition and prevented more than 1,000 “imposters” from entering the US at air and land borders.

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