Facial Recognition: A cross-national Survey on Public Acceptance, Privacy, and Discrimination
This addresses the need for policy guidance on FRT deployment by surveying public opinion across nations, though it is incremental as it collects data without proposing new methods.
The paper tackles the problem of varying public perceptions and policy uncertainty regarding facial recognition technology (FRT) by conducting a cross-national survey in China, Germany, the UK, and the US, providing insights on acceptance, privacy, and discrimination to inform policymakers.
With rapid advances in machine learning (ML), more of this technology is being deployed into the real world interacting with us and our environment. One of the most widely applied application of ML is facial recognition as it is running on millions of devices. While being useful for some people, others perceive it as a threat when used by public authorities. This discrepancy and the lack of policy increases the uncertainty in the ML community about the future direction of facial recognition research and development. In this paper we present results from a cross-national survey about public acceptance, privacy, and discrimination of the use of facial recognition technology (FRT) in the public. This study provides insights about the opinion towards FRT from China, Germany, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US), which can serve as input for policy makers and legal regulators.