The big picture: IBM’s proposal joins calls for federal facial recognition regulations from Microsoft, Amazon and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

• Big Tech is threatened by a yearlong groundswell of bans and proposed restrictions on facial recognition bubbling up in cities like San Francisco and states like Massachusetts.
• The companies say these moves would cut off beneficial uses of the technology, like speeding up airport security or finding missing children.
• Yes, but: They stand to gain from keeping the market open.

What’s happening: In a white paper shared first with Axios, IBM is calling for what it calls “precision regulation.” That means limiting potentially harmful uses rather than forbidding use of the technology entirely.

• IBM proposes treating various kinds of facial recognition differently. Face detection software, which simply counts the number of faces in the scene, is less prone to abuse than face matching, which can pick specific people out of a crowd.
• “There will always be use cases that will be off-limits,” IBM chief privacy officer Christina Montgomery tells Axios. “That includes mass surveillance and racial profiling.”

https://www.axios.com/ibm-facial-recognition-regulation-ban-50000b77-109d-4472-b4c5-316b858e7d74.html