Two huge cross currents are sweeping the world of facial recognition—and moving head-on into each other. Companies are eagerly adopting facial recognition tools to better serve their customers, reduce their fraud risks, and manage their workforces. Meanwhile, legislatures and privacy advocates are pushing back hard. They challenge facial recognition as inherently overreaching, invasive of privacy, and prone to error and bias. Legal restrictions of different kinds have been enacted around the country, seemingly with more to come.

How will the tension sort itself out between new use cases, on the one hand, and the push for legal restrictions on the other—and when? And what’s a company to do right now, with facial recognition opportunities presenting themselves today while the law remains a moving target?

This two-part series aims to help. In this Part 1, we lay out the current laws governing facial recognition in the United States. In Part 2, we assess where the law is headed and offer some practical risk-reduction strategies.

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