There are tons of benign/helpful use cases for face ID. Your car can recognize you and automatically set your preferred radio stations, seat position etc. Your computer can log you in without a password. Border control can be "scan your passport here and keep walking". An airplane boarding card can be "take a picture with your webcam during check-in and just walk on the plane." Your phone can automatically "press the shutter" for a family picture when everyone is smiling, instead of guessing at that timer thingie. Your makeup mirror can turn on special lights when a face is in front of it. You can pre-set mood lighting for your apartment for when you bring a new date home vs football night. Your front door can unlock itself for a handful of trusted people, even when you're out of town and forgot to feed the cat. Or it can set an alarm when your mother in law comes over. You can search your entire media library for just the right picture: "with Phil, but not Gina, where we're having fun and in cat costumes."

Face identification has become the lightest weight authentication method available. So anywhere you would otherwise use something you know (password) or something you have (a transit pass), you could consider using something you are (your face) instead. It's not right for EVERY authentication scenario, but it should be considered for many of them.

Not everything AI is creepy or privacy invading. Especially when you consider running it locally.

That said, Rekognition as a product specifically targets law enforcement and federal agencies, and most of their use cases are NOT good IMO. We do need a strong product preference for open source, or products with AI ethics oversight.

Bias: I work for Microsoft helping big companies implement latest edge tech like this. MS has an ethics board filtering all its AI work, the Azure face ID product doesn't keep user data, and we often implement local-only face id in what I consider non-creepy scenarios. So that defines a lot of how I think "responsible implementation" looks.