A new bill introduced in the Senate Tuesday would heavily curtail the use of facial recognition technology by individuals and private companies, and would ban them from selling biometric data, including pictures of people identified by facial recognition.

The National Biometric Information Privacy Act of 2020, cosponsored by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), would make it illegal for corporations to use facial recognition to identify people unless they obtain those people's consent and are carrying out facial recognition for a "valid business purpose."

"Do we really want to live under constant surveillance by unaccountable corporations? I don't. We cannot allow Orwellian facial recognition technology to continue to violate the privacy and civil liberties of the American people," Sanders said in a statement to Business Insider.

If passed, the bill would leave little room for controversial facial recognition companies like Clearview AI to operate outside of government contracts. Clearview AI aggregates pictures of people from social media sites to build a searchable facial recognition database, which lets its clients identify people by uploading a photo of them — a practice that has drawn fierce backlash from privacy advocates.