Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) – After learning Wegmans announced it was informing customers it was collecting biometric data, leaders in Erie County are calling for laws to prevent how the data is used.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz says it’s disheartening to learn retailers are using facial recognition and other biometric data to create a database of their customers and other individuals.
“It’s not as if your credit card got broken into and they tried to steal from your credit card,” said Poloncarz in an interview with WBEN. “If this got compromised with the AI technology that exists today, people could do many nefarious things just with somebody’s face. So I believe it is imperative that we as a county pass a law that bars any organization, retail or establishment that opens itself to the public from first off compiling this data, facial recognition, other types of biometric data, and then storing it. I’m very worried about the long term potential ramifications of that and the impact it could have on individuals.”…