According to reports, facial recognition is being used by the government and some big tech companies free of federal regulation and nowadays the government process making efforts to craft a voluntary code of conduct to govern the technology seems to be not working the way it expected.

It was written in a letter received by The Washington Post on Tuesday that privacy groups are exiting the multi-stakeholder meetings organized by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunication and Information Administration.

According to the letter, at the present they don’t think that the NTIA process will come up with a set of privacy rules that provide enough protections for using facial recognition technology.

The letter says, “We are convinced that in many contexts, facial recognition of consumers should only occur when an individual has affirmatively decided to allow it to occur. In recent NTIA meetings, however, industry stakeholders were unable to agree on any concrete scenario”. They added that in such conditions, companies should use facial recognition only with a consumer’s permission.

Since February 2014, NTIA has hosted 12 meetings on the matter. In the beginning, Alvaro Bedoya, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Law, asked if companies could assume making opt-in for facial recognition technology the default to identify people, indicating that if companies were looking forward to use someone’s face for naming them, the individual would have to take upon himself.

Then Justin Brookman, the director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s consumer privacy project asked whether any company or trade association would be accepting that.