Comment by jsrozner

It's time for regulation that no images of people may be retained for any commercial purpose without explicit permission of the person whose image is retained. Facial recognition performed on any person who has not granted explicit permission (or, in the case of government, against whom a search warrant has not been obtained) should be illegal. Nor shall any compressed version, broadly defined, of the data be retained (i.e., no training on any sort of facial or pose data without explicit permission of all whose images are used in training).

Penalties should be in the %s of revenue or company assets. Whistleblowers should receive large sums for identifying violations.

In a broader vein, it's time for regulation forbidding the retention or aggregation of any person's data for any commercial purpose other than the one most proximal to the actual transaction in which the person engaged, unless they explicitly opt in.

What would the latter mean? Among other things, targeted ads and recommendation systems would become illegal. Cross-user aggregation (or e.g., a company engaging in any user-longitudinal data analytics) would be illegal. In SQL language, ideally the only time you could do any query with a user ID returning multiple rows for further use would be to serve data directly back to the user. In the long run, such queries should be impossible by requiring something like a) per-user encrypted storage, b) user owned data, c) non-correlatable per-user IDs across transactions.

It will never happen because -- as noted in the article -- many folks in SillyCon valley and government are technofascists, but it should, because our current situation violates all reasonable notions of privacy.