Facial recognition: Big secret! Your Face Is the Next Frontier in ESG Investing
After successfully persuading the energy industry to curb its climate impact, the fund management world is turning its attention to reining in tech. But there’s a danger that by trying to cover too many non-financial bases, investors will end up weakening their clout.
Their primary focus is on facial recognition technology, which is developing rapidly both as a law enforcement tool for governments and in applications for companies wanting to target individual customers. How these software systems are used — or misused — looks set to become the next pressure point for investors seeking to allocate capital in line with environmental, social and governance standards.
Our Internet browsing has already provided a trove of data, allowing websites to pepper us with pop-up ads designed to appeal to our particular habits. Now information gathering is increasingly happening in the physical world. Imagine an electronic billboard with a camera that can scan your visage to identify your age and gender, and then flash up an ad specifically targeting your demographic.
Privacy rules are struggling to keep up with the enhanced ability of software to screen large groups of people in real time, amassing data without permission and risking running roughshod over the most basic civil liberties.
“When sensitive personal data is collected on a mass scale without people’s knowledge, choice or control, the impacts could be significant,” Elizabeth Denham, Britain’s privacy chief as U.K. Information Commissioner, said in a blog posted on Friday.
Earlier this month, 50 global asset management firms overseeing more than $4.5 trillion pledged to press the companies they invest in to ensure facial recognition technology is developed “in an ethical way,
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