Mapping the Stakeholder Debate on Facial Recognition Technologies: Review and Stakeholder Workshop

Debates over the use of facial recognition technology (FRT) are intensifying across different countries worldwide. While we can observe an increase in FRT usage driven by governments and industry, various stakeholders are raising important concerns. To contribute to a cooperative discourse on FRTs, in this paper, we first perform an integrative literature review and investigate the advantages, risks, areas of application, and stakeholders. Based on this analysis, we then design and facilitate a multi-stakeholder workshop aimed at cooperatively assessing the technology's impact. Workshop findings reveal significant differences in the positions held by stakeholders, indicating differing perspectives on the subject. The results from our study underscore the need for careful impact assessments before deploying FRTs, as well as stakeholder engagement through sustained and well-informed dialogues to cooperatively determine technical feasibility for specific use cases and short- and long-term societal impact. The insights from our research can serve as guidance for future work. We discuss the study's results, provide policy recommendations for the governance of FRTs, and share the framework for a 2.5h stakeholder workshop on the impact of FRTs.