Is Facebook Sabotaging A Face-Recognition Law? (fortune.com)

"You know something's up when politicians bring up a bill out of nowhere, and then try to ram it through over Memorial Day weekend," writes Fortune. "That's what's happening in Illinois, where state lawmakers -- allegedly at the behest of Facebook and Google -- are poised to gut a law that limits the use of facial recognition technology." An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this month a judge refused to throw out a class action complaint against Facebook for using facial recognition software to identify people without their permission and then inviting their friends to "tag" them. Now that suit's lawyer says a so-called "Biometric Information Privacy Act" will actually swap in new definitions for "photograph" and "scan" that will apparently shield Facebook and Google from liability.
The Center for Democracy and Technology called the bill "an unnecessary loss of privacy." Google didn't respond to Fortune's request for a comment, and Facebook said only "We appreciate Senator Link's effort to clarify the scope of the law he authored."

Comments

Argument or abuse?

[argumentsockpuppet]

In the US, this is an issue tied closely to freedom of the press. When you restrict the rights of the press, you potentially enable abuse which is why it was important enough to be included in the bill of rights.

In modern usage, the freedom of the press includes the rights to take photographs and use them in ways that make other people unhappy.

There are reasonable restrictions placed on that freedom as with all the other freedoms spelled out in the bill of rights. You don't have a right to take photographs on private property when the owner says you can't. You don't have the right to take photographs of people in settings where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as restrooms. While you do have the right to take a picture from the public sidewalk of what you see through the open window of someone's home, you don't have that right if they have blinds intended to prevent it.

This means you can take pictures of your mayor smoking crack so long as he's not doing it in his house with the blinds drawn. You can take pictures of protesters and parades without needing to get waivers from everyone photographed. The reason you can watch News Years celebrations in Central Park is because the freedom to photograph and even video those people, even live, without getting waivers is protected by the bill of rights.

You have the right to do this too, whether you're a journalist or not, because journalism doesn't rely on a government agency to approve who gets to be a journalist or not. This is also critical to preventing abuse.

The upshot of all this is that you have the right to take photographs and video without consent and use those photos and videos however you like with only a few reasonable restrictions.

In Illinois they decided the state has the right to restrict the freedom to use pictures and videos in certain ways. It's not unusual for states to restrict freedoms within their borders in order to maintain the balance of freedoms between different people, and it isn't necessarily a problem. In most cases the states are careful to craft any laws, particularly those that restrict freedoms guaranteed by the bill of rights, very carefully so that the law won't be invalidated by the federal courts.

I think this law is bound to eventually be invalidated by federal courts. Some public figure will be photographed doing something shady and the photograph will be correlated to the figure by biometric algorithms. When that happens, the public figure will try to shut down the story using this law and journalists will prevail in the courts because of the protections of the bill of rights.

Eventually we will have to accept that being photographed in public and having computers organize, sort and assist us with those pictures is something that cannot be prevented without compromising the basic rights that support our legislative system.

Whether we will decide that the protections of a free press or our privacy is more important in the long run is something that worries me. Americans are all too often more interested in their comfort than their freedom and that trend worries me.

Summary is perfectly accurate

[golodh]

@RayMorris

Sorry but you're completely wrong and I take particular offense at your use of weasel-words like "clarify". The law is _not_ being "clarified", it's being altered.

The article's summary is perfectly accurate in that it states that the proposed changes are aimed at allowing Facebook and Google to identify people from any online photographs they may get their hands on.

The changes in the wording of the law (that you so helpfully posted, thanks for that) do precisely that by (1) excluding photographs of any kind from the definition of "biometric information" and narrowing down the definition a "scan" to a procedure that physically passes a sensor over any part of your body.

The language of the law still prohibits me from scanning your retina or your fingerprints (than handy scanner in your mobile phone) and using that to identify you online. As in: ""Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry."

However it clearly allows anyone to scan photographs (one or more) of your face, use facial recognition software on that or even do a 3-D reconstruction job to make a 3-D model of your head, and use that to identify you online.

The only thing you need to do to understand that is to read the law from the point of view of Google or Facebook and ask: "Will this law prevent me from ID'ing everyone online we can get a picture of?".

The answer is a clear "No, this (amended) law will not prevent me from ID'ing people online based on scanning and analysing their photographs !".