Face Recognition Privacy Act aims to protect your identifying info

US Senators Roy Blunt and Brian Schatz want to protect people’s facial recognition data and make it much harder to sell now that information is treated as currency. The lawmakers have introduced the bipartisan Commercial Facial Recognition Privacy Act of 2019, which prohibits companies from collecting and resharing face data for identifying or tracking purposes without people’s consent.

The Senators have conjured up the bill because while facial recognition has been used for security and surveillance for decades, it’s “now being developed at increasing rates for commercial applications.” They argue that a lot of people aren’t aware that the technology is being used in public spaces and that companies can collect identifiable info to share or sell to third parties — similar to how carriers have been selling location data to bounty hunters for years.