IMVC Webinar Series - Face Recognition Under Fire: Privacy Regulations and the Great Shutdown
- Jan 6
- 2 min read
The IMVC Webinar Series continues with its third webinar, which will take place on January 22 at 18:00. The webinar will focus on one of the most pressing challenges facing computer vision today: face recognition in the age of privacy regulation.
In recent years, face recognition has transitioned from a cutting-edge research topic into widely deployed, off-the-shelf technology. However, as adoption accelerated, so did regulatory scrutiny. Today, even technically flawless systems can expose organizations to massive legal and financial risk—not due to misidentification, but due to the absence of informed consent.
In this upcoming webinar, Tal Hassner will examine how privacy laws such as BIPA, CUBI, and GDPR have reshaped the face recognition landscape. Drawing on real-world cases involving major technology companies, the talk will explore why billion-user systems were shut down, what led to over $2.4 billion in settlements, and how these outcomes could have been avoided.
In this webinar, Tal Hassner will cover:
How privacy regulations directly impact face recognition system design
Why legal compliance—not accuracy—is now the primary bottleneck
What went wrong in large-scale deployments at major tech companies
What types of recognition systems remain legally safe to build
Why the future of face recognition depends on respecting the boundary between technical capability and legal permission
Tal Hassner received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science and has held academic positions at the Open University of Israel and the University of Southern California. He previously led face recognition and responsible AI initiatives at AWS Rekognition and Meta, and as of April 2024 is the Co-Founder and CTO of WEIR AI. Tal has served in leadership roles for major vision conferences, including ICCV, ECCV, and WACV, and is an associate editor for IEEE-TPAMI and IEEE-TBIOM.
To register click here
Stay tuned for more webinars in the series leading up to the 15th Israel Machine Vision Conference (IMVC) 2026 on April 27, 2026, at Pavilion 10, EXPO Tel Aviv.