From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.

Recent headlines have been full of references to facial recognition technology,

which promises unprecedented convenience as well as new and difficult privacy concerns.

Businesses, most prominently Amazon, want to use facial recognition to create a seamless consumer

experience while collecting valuable information for its platform and advertisers.

And in the hands of government, whether it be local law enforcement or ICE,

facial recognition technology opens the door to surveillance on a scale not previously possible.

Our guest today is my colleague Nicole Ozer, the Technology and Civil Liberties Director for the ACLU of

California. Nikki has been at the forefront of debates around privacy and technology for more than

15 years. She's here to help us understand facial recognition technology and why it raises

important civil rights and civil liberties concerns. Thank you very much for joining us, Nikki. Welcome to the

podcast. Thanks so much. So nice to join you. Just joining us, Nikki. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much. So nice to join you. Just this week, I received an email from my undergraduate alma mater, and they were proudly announcing that the campus restaurant was now featuring kiosks,

whereby a small machine would take an image, a face print, they called it, and it would be

linked to your order and to your payment method. Why should this concern us? Well, there are so many

questions there. One is, is it even necessary to be using that type of system? The second is what's going to happen

to all that really personal information once it's being used? How is it going to be protected?

Is there a third party that's actually collecting that information and potentially using it in

other ways? It wouldn't surprise me if the campus really hasn't asked any of those

hard questions and isn't really thinking about the fact that, you know, nobody can change their face.

So if that information gets breached or ends up being used in other ways, there's very little

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