A property management company in Tianjin was sued by residents for using face recognition as the only way to verify access to the community. The court of first instance held that the relevant evidence could not prove that the defendant had violated his right to privacy. Recently, the court of second instance changed its judgment. The court asked the property company to delete the plaintiff's face information and provide him with other common verification methods to enter and leave the community.
This lawsuit reminds people of the "first case of face recognition" in China. In 2019, guobing, an associate professor of Zhejiang University of technology, sued Hangzhou wildlife world for using face recognition to enter the park. Guobing believed that face information belonged to highly sensitive personal privacy and asked the other party to delete it. Finally, guobing won the lawsuit. This case was selected as one of the "top ten cases of the people's court in 2021" and was also included in the work report of the Supreme People's Court of this year's two sessions of the National People's Congress. It is a model for the judicial protection of personal information.
In the face recognition case in Tianjin, the court finally ruled that the property company that took face brushing as the only way of passage was illegal, and once again protected the legitimate rights and interests of the parties to face information in accordance with the law. However, in real life, although such lawsuits have aroused widespread concern, they still fail to stop the abuse of face recognition technology in some fields.
It should be said that face recognition technology has its positive value: its recognition degree is high, the error recognition rate is low, it is difficult to forge, and it can greatly improve the security of important occasions; Face recognition is convenient, fast and non-contact, which is helpful for personnel recognition in epidemic prevention and other occasions... Based on these advantages, face recognition technology has been used to solve personal identity recognition problems in many fields.
However, just because face information is unique, easy to obtain and difficult to change, once it is leaked, it is almost impossible to remedy. What is more frightening is that with the wide application of face recognition technology, once the face information is leaked, "losing" is not only the face, but also multi-dimensional information such as personal identity and property. If these information is stolen and used by criminals, the consequences will be unimaginable for individuals.
Therefore, face information belongs to sensitive personal information protected by law, and face recognition must be prevented from being abused. According to China's personal information protection law and other relevant provisions, unless otherwise provided by laws and administrative regulations, the processing of personal information shall be subject to the consent of the natural person or his guardian, and shall follow the principles of legality, legitimacy and necessity. But nowadays, whether it is important, important or unnecessary, the use of face recognition technology seems to be "fashionable". Some communities even take face brushing as the only way to pass, which undoubtedly violates the necessary principle.
The provisions of the Supreme People's Court on Several Issues concerning the application of law in the trial of civil cases involving the use of face recognition technology to process personal information, which came into effect on August 1, 2021, clearly stipulates that the property service enterprises or other building managers use face recognition as the only verification method for the owners or property users to enter and leave the property service area, and the owners or property users who do not agree request them to provide other reasonable verification methods, The people's court shall support it according to law. This is also one of the legal basis for the court to decide that the property company lost the lawsuit. Other property management companies should take this as their training.
The key is to strictly abide by the legal requirements by using face recognition technology. Before collecting face information, enterprises and organizations must follow the principles of necessity review and individual informed consent; When storing and using face information, we should strictly abide by the relevant laws and regulations on personal information protection, take necessary encryption measures, and set appropriate access and operation permissions to prevent personal information from being leaked, tampered with and lost.
In view of the current trend that face recognition technology is abused, relevant experts suggest that industry standards and national standards should be established, and even special management systems or regulations should be issued to standardize the collection and application procedures and privacy boundaries of face recognition information, such as clarifying which fields can be used and which cannot be used, and how to punish and respond to information leakage; Establish a nationwide unified third-party face information database supervised by government departments, and strictly require that all face recognition units can only store the collected data in this database. These are all directions worth exploring. (heyonghai)