Facial recognition technology is a threat to everyone's privacy.

Facial recognition technology – especially as the technology becomes more sophisticated – may be one of the gravest privacy threats of our time. It has the potential to remove the anonymity we expect in crowds and most public places. There are the obvious “chilling effects” it could have on political demonstrations and speech, concerns being monitored by civil liberties advocates like the ACLU, EPIC, and EFF. However, this technology will also very likely be used in greater capacity in the commercial sector to further target consumers for advertising and discriminatory pricing purposes.

According to an article published recently by the Los Angeles Times, several companies have already launched, or plan to launch soon, facial recognition technology that will be used for in-store digital displays and kiosks to make product suggestions based on the demographics gleaned from your face. This might include your sex, your age range, and your race or ethnicity.

However, the article fails to mention the possibility that facial recognition software will likely be used for more than demographic targeting. In his book Niche Envy, Joseph Turow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, explains how companies are using increasingly sophisticated market segmentation methods to offer different prices to different people, a practice known as price discrimination. The more detailed the profile a company can build on you, the more accurately it can estimate how much you are willing to spend on a product.

Professor Turow focused primarily on online data collection, but as the Carnegie Mellon study illustrates, facial recognition technology makes it possible to connect your offline identity with your online identity without necessarily obtaining your consent. As facial recognition technology advances and the number of consumers using social media continues to increase, it’s not far-fetched to imagine a scenario where you walk into a store and are treated differently or even see different prices based on the combination of your biometric data and personal information publicly available online.

A further concern is the unwanted identification of individuals with sensitive circumstances, such as victims of domestic violence, stalking victims and law enforcement officers.

https://www.privacyrights.org/facial-recognition-threat-to-your-privacy-2011

Advertisers start using facial recognition to tailor pitches:
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/21/business/la-fi-facial-recognition-20110821