Updated January 20, 2023 1980s-2010s: Surveillance Video Recording Era Begins
With wider adoption beginning in the 1980s in the United States, commercial ventures have recorded, reviewed, stored, and edited video data of legal invitees, such as employees, customers, and contractors, as well as licensees and trespassers, to their physical premises. These recordings initially were captured and stored on magnetic tapes, and, later, on DVDs.
2010s: Software Recording Systems
Since 2015, commercial use of software-based recordings from video camera systems in low- to high-resolution images gained wide adoption as these systems lowered in cost and inexpensive, lightweight, and low-energy consumption hardware devices benefited from powerful chipsets and miniaturization. These software-based video-capture systems stored image data on local hard drives of the recording business, and, more commonly today, in cloud-based servers of third-party services that securely transfer the data from the physical recording location through the Internet to the processing and storage server locations.
2020s: Rise Of AI-Processed Video & Video Recording Aren’t Mere Surveillance
As commercial companies have embraced data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), initially to increase worker efficiency, monitor supply chains, and seek other competitive advantages that data mining and reporting provide to their operations and retail experiences, organizations have had increasing demand to apply AI to video capture systems in their physical sites.
2023: Policymakers Respond To Clarify Limits Of AI Video Processing
Federal, state, and local law makers, and national and international trade groups, have begun to discuss and define protections of individual data rights beyond the spheres of financial transactions, health care, student, and employee data. United States regulators at the federal, state, and local levels have begun to clarify the legal pathway for principled image-processing providers and commercial businesses regarding how these recordings may be recorded, secured, processed, edited, deleted, transferred, and stored, as evidenced by legislative, administrative enforcement, and regulatory advisory trends in 2021-2022.
Compliance Must Be Collaborative
In the current era of commercial video recording, the SKAIVISION development and leadership teams predict additional regulatory action in 2023 that will clarify what is, and is not, permitted activity for commercial capture of still image and moving-image recordings, particularly regarding capture, scanning, storage, processing, and sharing of images of the human form, head, face, and human movement.
SKAIVISION AI Software Supports Compliance
SKAIVISION has invested both in building industry-leading AI image-processing software and in its AI-law compliance team. SKAIVISION monitors laws affecting consumer rights, property law, cybersecurity requirements, consent and privacy concerns, employment law, equal opportunity claims, and data privacy. Enforcement actions of the FTC, European Commission, and State of California inform organizations to use AI-based image processing with compliance-rooted controls, bias monitoring, cybersecurity, and clear notice regimes.
NAVIGATING THE REGULATORY ATMOSPHERE
Compliance Support For Video Capture Of Human Forms & Activity
Our product design, development, risk, and legal team members coordinate as we design, develop, and deploy our products and services. Many of our customers seek compliance support for video capture of human forms and faces in the United States, which does not have a single, comprehensive, federal law regulating privacy rights of the collection, use, processing, disclosure, and security of personal information, including data from surveillance video systems.
Your Industry’s Standards. Our Industry’s Intelligence
Our services support our customers as they comply with a growing patchwork of federal and state laws and regulations, and common law principles. In a complicated and changing legal environment, and competitive business markets, our services include advising our customers about proper deployment and usage of our video-capture and processing platform, including (i) proper site notices, (ii) local opt-in and opt-out measures, (iii) processing and identification limitations for invitees versus licensees and trespassers, (iv) data management and storage of image files, and (v) proper destruction and deletion of original recordings and reporting information.
A Comprehensive Approach To Legal Compliance
Our products and services are tuned consistently to law changes affecting human video capture, such as:
(i) consumer privacy laws and regulations, (ii) sector-specific privacy laws, (iii) state privacy laws, and (iv) industry self-regulation.
REGULATORY OUTLOOK FOR 2023
In 2022, commercial and retail AI regulation models began to emerge. Our government affairs and regulatory investigators predict that 2023 will provide new AI-image analysis obligations for organizations that will arise from legislation, regulatory opinions, and an increase in government enforcement. We are monitoring opinions, protocol publications, and enforcement actions by the FTC, NIST, FBI, and DOJ, as well as state legislatures and regulatory bodies, and aggressive county and city councils. We have reason to believe that enforcement actions will increase in 2023 and beyond.
In the present, “test case” enforcement environment, SKAIVISION can help its clients avoid being one. SKAIVISION’s video capture and processing systems avoid use of traditional facial recognition, don’t monitor for disability or track personal information of recorded humans, and our platform is not trained by large third-party human image datasets.
Deploy With Anonymization, Pseudonymization, And Usage Minimization
Our systems have been designed to avoid or minimize individualized identification and does not name-assign individuals. We limit personal identifiers and focus our system upon human-form identification, rather than facial recognition. We frequently validate our systems security and for data management requirements. We designed our AI platform to help client organizations to utilize their existing video recording systems and streams more intelligently, and we help our clients reach compliance standards while we solve their core business problems.
We Survey And Track Federal, State, And Local Laws
that regulate consumer and employee data privacy for capture, storage, processing, opt-in and opt-out requirements, rights to deletion, notices, sharing, and secure transfer. Key jurisdictions in which we have undertaken compliance audits in 2023 include: California, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and target metropolitan areas, such as Portland, OR, and Baltimore, MD.