Virginia Law Bans Local Police Use of Facial Recognition Technology

Disclosure: I work in the field of facial/emotional recognition.

This bill [0] seems pretty decent. There could be improvements; as per usual, the definition of FR isn't great, but it's one of the better ones I've seen.

> "facial recognition technology" means an electronic system for enrolling, capturing, extracting, comparing, and matching an individual's geometric facial data to identify individuals in photos, videos, or real time...

This ought to exclude things like face detection, alignment, and landmark annotation. Unclear if it would affect things like sentiment analysis, gait analysis, etc. Unclear if it's allowed to generate feature vectors (and operate on those) so long as it isn't used "to identify individuals." But it's scoped to LEOs, which is nice, as it won't affect academic research.

I'm generally in favor of more aggressive / overreaching regulations on ML/AI now, while the world is moving so fast and there is so much potential for abuse. They can always be repealed later, and there's always going to be entities which will push the envelope, regardless.

[0] https://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?212+ful+HB2031E...