Are Democrats and Republicans That Far Apart on Facial Recognition? It Depends Who’s in the White House

With privacy and government surveillance being increasingly salient issues in the discussion around biometric technologies, industry stakeholders may be overlooking the importance of political partisanship in the discourse, suggests a recent Scientific American op-ed by Samuel Dooley, Angelica Goetzen, and Elissa M. Redmiles, affiliates of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems.

Citing their own, broad-reaching study based on survey data collected during the summers of 2020 and 2021, the authors argue that while a shrinking number of Americans support warrantless government surveillance, their attitudes aren’t based on a principled view of privacy rights but rather on a partisan fear of ‘the other’.