this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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In the context of facial recognition, "biometric data" is just a picture of your face. If you've ever uploaded a photo of yourself to any website/service, then you've already lost that fight.
Edit: to everyone downvoting, explain why you think you know better than someone who worked in that industry and developed computer vision and facial recognition software for 10 years.
Edit 2: I think people are misunderstanding what I said. I'm not saying your photo "tracks where you are", but rather if your face exists anywhere on the internet (with associated info about who you are) then that's all anyone needs to build a facial recognition profile on you.
They just need to scrape various websites for the info and put it into a database. This is exactly what Clearview AI did. They scrapped Facebook and other publicly accessible websites and built a giant database that they then used to give police and other orgs access to via their software.
So my point was "think twice before you upload a photo with your face to any website or service"
We don't know better, we just hate you because YOU helped build this problem.
You have no idea what I did.
The company I worked for built firearms detection for facilities that prohibited weapons, and facial recognition for access control systems. We even built a version of our facial rec system for a school that had a problem with an alarmingly high amount of sex offenders living in the immediate area. So that system was built explicitly to keep sex offenders away from the school.
Our system was literally built with security and privacy in mind. We insisted on air gapped networks for the architecture. We were asked by several clients if we could make the system accessible via "the cloud" and we said no. We were asked if we could build a function to catalogue all faces seen to build up a database and provide insights if someone at a later point caused an issue and the historical data could be reviewed to see what they did in the past. We said no.
The company doesn't exist anymore (covid killed us, we were a very small company and not US American), and our IP stayed with us. I also know for a fact that no one else has implemented some of the cutting edge methodology we used.
So no. I didn't help build "this problem", because nothing I've built is being used anymore. And if anything, we helped hold the tide on some of the stuff used today. If we had a different ethical approach we probably could have gone farther and faster with the company, but we didn't.
And as a side point: you basically admitted that you used the downvote button as an irrational emotional outlet instead of actually reading what I said as valuable insight. I pointed out that a photo of your face literally counts as "biometric data", and that it's something people should be more guarded about. The mathematical model generated from your face is frankly irrelevant. It's worthless outside of the system that generated it, and actually worthless without the photo of the person. Because without the photo, there's no way to validate the detection.
So good job with your baseless hate. We certainly don't have enough of that going around.
Sounds like a Lotta copium to me lol
None at all. I know what we did and how we went about it. And I know we put a lot of effort into making things as privacy respecting as possible.
The truth is I doubt we would have been able to survive the landscape because there are many other companies that have zero qualms about building un-ethical software.
The funny thing is that in one of our deployments there was one local who kept making a massive fuss about our stuff, and quite literally making up lies about what we were doing and how our system worked. Now that we're gone from that scene, other companies have stepped in who gladly do all the stuff we refused to do.
And I gave a very high level description. There's a LOT of stuff I won't (and can't) share details of. All I will say is that there was a military contractor that was very impressed by our stuff and wanted to drop a lot of money on us (this was after covid started and our sales opportunities died due to travel restrictions). After we asked questions about the intended use, we said "no thanks" and walked away from the deal. We did that because it was clear to us that our software would absolutely be used in one way or another in the process to hurt people.
So like I said, not a drop of copium.
that's false. if I upload a photo, that won't make it known where will I be at any later point in time. it also assumes that we have uploaded pictures of ours to the internet.
It's not false. I previously worked for a facial recognition company. Every single facial recognition system uses a photo (or series of photos) to extract the mathematical representation of a face. But literally every single system uses a different algorithm. Once they make the extraction, that data is 100% useless to anyone other than that vendor/system.
Ultimately it doesn't matter, because the source photo is what's more valuable, since that can be used by any system to generate a face model of an individual and it can be read/seen/interpreted by people also.
Hence why I said "If you've ever uploaded a photo of yourself".
I'm sorry, what??