There may very well be many causes for these crosscurrents. Governments would possibly acknowledge that facial recognition might help public security — an necessary societal want. Corporations won’t wish to sit on the sidelines and permit their opponents to achieve benefit in bringing an thrilling new expertise to {the marketplace}. Across all sectors, the notion could be that any harms attributable to facial recognition are an inconvenience that may be lived with. That’s harmful and unwise.

A 2020 statement from the U.S. Technology Policy Committee (USTPC) of the Association for Computing Machinery emphasised that flaws in these methods regularly can and do lengthen to profound damage, notably to the lives, livelihoods and basic rights of people in particular demographic teams, together with among the most weak populations in our society.

Accordingly, the USTPC urged a direct suspension of the present and future personal and governmental use of facial recognition applied sciences in all circumstances recognized or fairly foreseeable to be prejudicial to established human and authorized rights. The USTPC additionally outlined a set of guiding ideas that ought to govern the design and deployment of facial recognition methods sooner or later.

Technology advances at a lightning tempo; legislation and coverage transfer extra intentionally. But this doesn’t imply they will’t get in step. In reality, they need to.

Jeremy Epstein, Washington

The author is chair of the Association for Computing Machinery’s U.S. Technology Policy Committee.