Date of Award

January 2015

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Communication

First Advisor

Slavka Antonova

Abstract

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration have convened a series of meetings to create a voluntary code of conduct for the commercial use of facial recognition technology. This research asks and answers three questions related to the creation of the voluntary code of conduct: 1) How is the regulatory regime of FRT emerging in the U.S.? 2) What are the roles of the various stakeholders in shaping the commercial regulation of FRT? 3) How does FRT challenge our current conceptions of privacy? Data has been gathered to answer these questions using participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The data was analyzed via mediated discourse analysis. Findings of the research include: the highly sensitive nature of the biometric data that facial recognition technology collects, the data’s ability to be linked across multiple databases, the surreptitious way the data can be collected, the potential chilling effect the technology can have on the First Amendment, and the various threats the technology poses to privacy.

Keywords: Privacy, Facial Recognition Technology, Multistakeholder, and Biometric Data

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