The talks continued without the advocates, and in 2016 the NTIA issued its “Privacy Best Practice Recommendations for Commercial Facial Recognition Use.” The guidelines should be understood as the “best” for the surveillance capitalists but as the “worst” for everyone else. In the language of these guidelines, the tech companies, retailers, and others determined to chase surveillance revenues are simply “encouraged” to make their policies on facial recognition “available to consumers, in a reasonable manner.…” Where companies impose facial recognition on a physical location, they are “encouraged” to provide “notice” to consumers. Rendition operations are tacitly accorded legitimacy, not only in the lack of contest, but because they stand as the immovable facts draped in the cheap garlands of toothless “best practices.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 791