National Academies: “Advances in Facial Recognition Technology Have Outpaced Laws, Regulations; New Report Recommends Federal Government Take Action on Privacy, Equity, and Civil Liberties Concerns. Some uses of facial recognition technology raise significant concerns that merit a swift government response, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report recommends consideration of federal legislation and an executive order, as well as attention from courts, the private sector, civil society organizations, and other organizations that work with facial recognition technology, and provides guidance for the technology’s responsible development and deployment.  A powerful and increasingly used tool, facial recognition technology is useful for a large range of identity verification and identification applications, offering capabilities for checking whether someone is who they say they are and identifying a person in an image. Systems utilize trained artificial intelligence models to extract facial features and create a biometric template from an image, and compare the features in the template to the features of another image or set of images to produce a similarity score. The accuracy and speed of these systems have advanced rapidly in the last decade with the adoption of deep neural network-based machine learning, the report says.   With few exceptions, the U.S. does not currently have authoritative guidance, regulations, or laws to adequately address issues related to facial recognition technology use, the report finds. It also notes that facial recognition technology can interfere with and substantially affect the values embodied in U.S. privacy, civil liberties, and human rights commitments — even if it does not necessarily violate rights and obligations included in statutes or constitutional provisions.”