evaluated. But also the downsides, risks and ethical issues of facial recognition technologies will be taken into account in this paper. Furthermore the privacy law will be discussed in this paper, with focus on the European law. Taken all these things into consideration, there can be given an answer to our main research question. 2. Facial recognition technologies i. Which facial recognition technologies exist? A numerous of facial recognition techniques and methods are being used for security and authentication purposes which includes areas in detective agencies and military purposes[25]. This way, the facial recognition techniques can play a role in preventing crime. There are multiple methods considered the two primary tasks of facial recognition, i.e. verification and identification. Verification, also called authentication, is presenting a face image of an unknown individual along with a claim of identity, and then ascertaining whether the individual is who he/she claims to be. Identification, also called recognition, is presenting an image of an unknown individual and determining that person’s identity by comparing that image with a database of images of known individuals[15]. There are even some facial recognition techniques that are able to see emotions. These techniques, as well as verification and identification are of great importance when it comes to finding criminals so crime can be prevented. A few examples of the many methods and algorithm that can be used within the field of facial recognition are: Geometric Feature Based Methods, Template Based Methods, Correlation Based Methods, Matching, Pursuit Based Methods, Singular Value Decomposition Based Methods, The Dynamic Link, Matching Methods, Illumination Invariant Processing Methods, Support Vector Machine Approach, Karhunen- Loeve Expansion Based Methods, Feature Based Methods, Neural Network Based Algorithms and Model Based Methods [25].>