Judicial move to curb misuse of facial recognition technology

The Supreme People's Court issued a regulation on Wednesday on the application of the law in civil cases involving the use of facial recognition technology to handle personal information.

This is of huge practical significance for strengthening judicial protection of personal information and promoting the unified and correct implementation of the law by courts at all levels.

Facial recognition is an important application of artificial intelligence. The face-print maps are quite in depth and can capture and compare more than 30,000 variables on a human face, including in real-time movement and under different lighting conditions.

The continuous advancement of technology has facilitated the wider use of facial recognition applications, from smart city construction to the logging in and unlocking of mobile phones.

Facial recognition technology also plays a big role in safeguarding the country's borders, public transport and urban public security, and responding to epidemics and more.

Although the technology makes social life convenient, there are increasing concerns about the threat it poses to personal information.

For example, some stores use the technology to collect consumers' facial information without consent, analyze their gender, age and behavior, and accordingly adopt different marketing strategies to attract more customers and increase their sales.

In recent years there have been cases of facial recognition information being leaked and then fraudsters using other people's identity to borrow money from banks or commit telecom frauds.

All these underline the need to strengthen the protection of facial information.
The regulation issued by the Supreme People's Court further says the abuse of facial recognition technology amounts to infringement of a person's rights and interests. It also says that if businesses want to use a person's facial information, they must first get the person's consent.

Using or storing personal information, including facial recognition, without a person's consent, amounts to an infringement of their rights and interests. The regulation also provides a series of provisions and judicial explanations for courts to handle relevant cases.

The judicial protection of personal information is in line with people's expectations and in line with the rule of law. It will also promote the healthy development of the digital economy.

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