calling this facial recognition is a bit of stretch when its more akin to "is a mask present?", not trying to match to people in a database. No different then self driving cars detecting a pedestrian. very far from unethical (although i would hope they would make an effort to accommodate all skin colors to not unintentionally discriminate against anyone.)

> not trying to match to people in a database

Are you sure it’s not building one?

What is it going to record? "Dude with a mask" ?

“Dude who ignored a mask mandate from the government”

Facial recognition with masks is already working [1]. So storing facial images of all customers entering store with or without mask is essentially the same.

[1] https://apex.aero/articles/facial-recognition-tech-works-mas...

Facial recognition everywhere is a horrifying thought.

Some might see a million dead people as a worse thought.

I don't really like the idea of facial recognition, but the political class lives in a public facing world where every move they make is scrutinized. So they see the world maybe differently than when they're private citizens.

I guess it depends where each person falls on the “freedom vs safety” spectrum. I’m strongly on the “freedom” side. But I feel it’s a perspective based in some objectivity, as it’s generally a lot easier for one to protect themselves than to free themselves.

perhaps it will incentivizes mask wearing to get around the facial recognize and tracking and help with covid as a side effect

Software, or a person, could do this without knowing whose face is presented and without keeping records.

That's not enough. Someone standing in front of such a system cannot tell whether records are kept, or shared.

1. One risk is that the government will slowly erode any limitations. In Germany, one of the most privacy oriented countries, restaurants were required to collect contact information. This was announced as being strictly for covid contract tracing purposes. Less than a month later, the police in multiple states were found to have demanded and received access to those lists for reasons entirely unrelated to covid. So any default level of trust has already been betrayed.

2. Another risk is that the vendors themselves might prefer "alternative definitions" of record keeping and data sharing for various reasons (e.g. processing in the cloud and/or by third-party companies with even less restrictions, data collection for ML training purposes, selling the same dataset for profit, "flagged as hidden" vs "never actually stored", "stored to persistent media then deleted" vs "never persistently stored", preventing access by contractual/legal vs technical means...). The people making such promises are never ever the engineers that actually understand their system. And similar to the previous paragraph, companies have every incentive to slowly erode any guarantees they might've actually met at some point.

3. The people buying the products (shop owners) as a general rule have neither the expertise, time, motivation nor source code level access to call the vendors out.