Facial Recognition Opt-Out: A Step-by-Step Guide
The short version: A Business Reform walkthrough on opting out of PimEyes, FaceCheck.ID, and Social Catfish shows how porous facial recognition privacy really is in the US.
Our Take
Credit to Business Reform for doing the unglamorous work of actually testing these opt-out forms instead of just complaining about facial recognition in the abstract. The walkthrough on PimEyes, FaceCheck.ID, and Social Catfish is useful, but it also exposes something uglier: the fact that you have to manually beg a handful of private companies to stop selling your face is the whole problem. There's no federal law requiring any of this. Illinois residents get Clearview AI opt-outs because of one state's biometric privacy law, not because anyone in Washington decided Americans deserve control over their own likeness.
This matters to us because facial recognition and ALPR surveillance are two heads of the same animal. Flock Safety's camera network is quietly building location histories on ordinary drivers the same way PimEyes scrapes faces off the internet — both rely on the assumption that nobody will notice or object until it's too late to opt out of anything. The difference is you can't submit a removal request to get your license plate out of a Flock database. There is no form.
If this video got you thinking about what else is being collected on you without consent, take a look at our camera map to see what's already watching your street, and check take-action for ways to push back on ALPR deployments in your own city.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Business Reform, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.