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Will San Francisco ban on facial recognition affect digital signage?

The San Francisco ban on facial recognition raises key questions for the digital signage industry.

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June 14, 2019

San Francisco recently put its foot down on facial recognition technology. The Board of Supervisors voted 8-1 early in May to approve the ban.

The city was aiming to proactively prevent law enforcement from using facial recognition technology to identify suspects, even though the San Francisco police has not yet used the technology. Annapolis, Maryland did use facial recognition technology in June 2018 to identify a mass shooter who killed five people during an attack at the newspaper The Capital Gazette.

"I think part of San Francisco being the real and perceived headquarters for all things tech also comes with a responsibility for its local legislators," Aaron Peskin, a city supervisor who sponsored the bill, told the New York Times. "We have an outsized responsibility to regulate the excesses of technology precisely because they are headquartered here."

However, this ban raises an important question for the digital signage industry: how will it affect the industry's usage of facial recognition technology?

Why the controversy?

Facial recognition technology has been fairly controversial in the past. JetBlue Airways Corp. introduced the technology for boarding aircraft. The airliner claims that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security submits the biometric data securely to the Customs and Border Protection database, but many customers are still creeped out by it, such as Mackenzie Fegan who was suspicious of the airliner taking her facial data, according to a report by ZDNet.

With such concerns floating around, it makes sense that a tech savvy city like San Francisco would ban it, Richard Carriere, senior VP of global marketing, Cyberlink, a facial recognition technology company, said.

"As a technology mecca, San Francisco’s ban on facial recognition technology came as a surprise for some. But it really shouldn't be -- as both the public and private sector are looking to better understand a technology that has recently come to the forefront, and weigh all its implications," Carriere said in an interview.

Will it affect digital signage?

The quick answer is: no, or at least not yet. The ban passed by the city is purely meant to prevent city officials from using the technology.

"Note that the current City of SF ban is purely at the municipal level. Federal and state-level initiatives are not part of the ban and nor are private initiatives," Carriere said.

One way to ensure that governments don't target digital signage is to have a clear grasp on what type of facial technology vendors actually use.

Defining terms

There are many different terms for technology that interacts with human faces such as facial detection technology, facial recognition technology, dynamic advertising and others. It is important to get a key understanding of what we are talking about when we discuss these tools.

During a keynote session at the Digital Signage Expo, which took place from March 26 to 29 at Las Vegas, Rich Ventura, VP of sales, NEC Display Solutions, shed some light on these terms.

Facial detection technology simply identifies a customer's gender, age or other details, Ventura said. It gathers anonymous information and uses it to deliver personalized advertisements.

Facial recognition technology on the other hand, uses a customer's face to directly identify them.

"We believe that when people understand that their private data is not kept outside of where it is already securely held and there is only a match between the live video feed and such data, it should alleviate concerns, especially if it results in dramatically enhanced user experiences," Carriere said.

Keeping the industry accountable

If digital signage vendors want to avoid a great deal of government oversight, they must be willing to call out bad actors in their field that misuse customer information. By allowing bad actors to invade customer's privacy, vendors degrade customer trust in digital signage technology and gain the attention of regulators, Ian Dallimore, director of digital growth at Lamar Advertising, said at the panel moderated by Ventura.

"Call out bad people in the industry that use data unethically," Dallimore said.