FTC Recommends Best Practices For Using Facial Recognition Technology

In an effort to stay ahead of the technology curve, the Federal Trade Commission (the "FTC") recently issued a staff report on advertisers'' use of facial recognition technology ("FRT"). 
 
As the FTC explains, FRT can take a number of different forms, from merely recognizing that there is a face in a photo, to uncovering age, gender and other similar general characteristics from a photo, all the way to actually putting names to faces, a la the Sci-Fi movie, "Minority Report." FRT may be employed in social media contexts (e.g., tagging photos of friends), digital billboards (e.g., serving targeted ads) or privacy protection mechanisms (e.g., authenticating permitted users).