Nobody would accept interconnected face scanners in every building they walk into but online it's somehow okay.
There are cars with license plate scanners that wardrive the world. They scan plates in shopping centers, businesses, and even apartment buildings so on the off chance law enforcement, repo businesses, or anyone who wants to know where your car is parked can track you.
People accept that. Or rather, most are blissfully unaware that it happens.
If your grocery store added face tracking to their existing security cameras, would you even know it? Would you know if they sold that data?
The Wild West mentality in the US kind of sucks when technology allows even small businesses the ability to screw over large numbers of people.
That is the problem.
Only people from places where it's too late to go back (like China) are aware of the dangers of these systems, but they can hardly warn the rest of us and when they do, we generally don't listen as "something like that surely wouldn't happen in my free country".
It would seem that people only get slightly spooked when a government does something that could impact their privacy (even when it actually doesn't - see the recent covid tracking app backlash in basically every country) but when private companies do it, they eat it up hapily.
If there were an opt-in way of doing this, it wouldn't bother me. Similarly with online tracking, if it were opt in only, it wouldn't bother me.
What is frustrating is the lack of transparency or ability to control who and where my data is collected.
There's not much risk to 'pay with your face' for Apple/Google/Samsung pay given it's all on-device biometrics that never leave the phone, but a similar situation is when Google paid $5 to people willing to submit their face to help with facial recognition training in the then-upcoming Pixel 4 phone.
https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/google-pixel-4-usd-5-f...
Private exercise of the same technology is merely deterred, but not stopped by GDPR (especially now that UK is "happily gone" from "EU overregulation"...).
And of course that ignores China which has cities that have both more total(Beijing, Shanghai) and more per-kilopop (Taiyuan, Wuxi) cameras than London.
[0] https://www.cctv.co.uk/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-there-in-lo... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/business/london-police-fa...