[...] there are frightening ones as well: allowing authoritarian states to identify peaceful protesters, enabling companies to accrue ever greater insight into private lives or empowering criminals to dig up sensitive information about strangers. "Facial recognition blows up assumptions that we don't wear our identities on our person; it turns our faces into name tags," said Ryan Calo, director of privacy at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society. [...] government officials are still grappling with online privacy questions from a decade ago, as private industry and law enforcement march ahead. Tech giants including Google, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo also employ facial recognition technology in photo, video or gaming products, as do a handful of lesser known mobile app companies. In a report last summer, academics at Carnegie Mellon University said they were able to derive the identity of students on campus from photos more than 30 percent of the time, using off-the-shelf facial recognition software and publicly accessible Facebook data. When it comes to social networks, "the best solution is to make data practices more transparent and to empower users to switch to different networks," said Yana Welinder, an academic fellow at Harvard Law School who wrote a recent paper on Facebook's facial recognition practices.
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