Just four years ago, the movement to ban police departments from using face recognition in the US was riding high. By the end of 2020, around 18 cities had enacted restrictive laws, and lawmakers proposed a pause on the federal government's use of it. In the years since, that effort has slowed to a halt. Some local bans have even been partially repealed, and today, few seriously believe that a federal ban could pass in the foreseeable future. Right now in the US, facial recognition regulations are trapped in political gridlock.

A US company that gathered photos of people from Facebook and other social media sites for use in facial recognition by its clients is facing a £17m fine after the Information Commissioner's Office found it had committed "serious breaches" of data protection law. Clearview AI, which describes itself as the "world's largest facial network", allows its customers to compare facial data against a database of over 10bn images harvested from the internet. The database is "likely to include the data of a substantial number of people from the UK and may have been gathered without people's knowledge from publicly available information online, including social media platforms", the ICO said. Clearview's technology had been offered on a "free trial basis" to UK law enforcement agencies, the data regulator added. It said Clearview had broken data protection law by failing to process the information of people in the UK in a way they were likely to expect or that was fair.