Knightscope’s security robots look cute. But these cone-headed automatons, which serve U.S. police departments and businesses, are serious surveillance machines.

One of the largest open datasets for training face recognition systems has its roots in a popular photo-sharing service. Companies that have used this data could find themselves liable for millions in legal recompense.

The French government plans to roll out a national identification service based on face recognition. Critics warn that the new system violates citizens’ privacy.

A number of countries restrict commercial use of personal data without consent unless they’re fully anonymized. A new paper proposes a way to anonymize images of faces, purportedly without degrading their usefulness in applications that rely on face recognition.

Amazon is writing what it hopes will become U.S. law governing use of face recognition technology. At a press event, Jeff Bezos told that his company’s lawyers are drafting a statutory framework to guide what he views as an inevitable federal crackdown on face recognition.

A growing number of nations use AI to track their citizens. A new report sheds light on who’s watching and how. “The Global Expansion of AI Surveillance” details which countries are buying surveillance gear, which companies are supplying it, and what technologies are most in-demand.

AI is capable of picking faces out of the crowd — even if that crowd is squabbling over bananas in a jungle. Researchers at the University of Oxford developed a face recognition app that identifies individual chimpanzees in footage shot in the wilds of Guinea.