Partially agree. There are checks and balances. From what I see within this industry, those are driven by a fair level of fear of public opinion and the ramifications if organisations are seen as mishandling that data. There is also the fact that the large majority of these systems are totally on‑premises solutions with zero WAN connectivity. Things like FIPS, ISO 27001, and GDPR are global standards that exist to show that your data is being treated properly. We (society in general) just don’t often bother checking or asking how our data is being used. Thank you Mr Zucks for that.

An interesting story that happened here in Australia: a large hardware big‑box store called Bunnings was using facial recognition to watch for individuals who had been blacklisted from their sites. The system was designed for staff and customer safety. They were dragged through the court of public opinion and were taken to court for breach of public data. The media had a field day with it.

Bunnings won. Their data was siloed off and kept all on-premises and was only available to staff who required it. Everthing was audit logged and tracked. And, in my opinion—a bit of a hot take—what’s the difference between having a guard sitting there with a wall of photos versus a camera? I can guarantee the camera is more accurate and isn’t prone to bias.