SURVEILLANCEThe Movement to Ban Government Use of Face Recognition
Our faces are unique identifiers that can’t be left at home, or replaced like a stolen ID or compromised password. Facial recognition technology facilitates covert mass surveillance of the places we frequent, people we associate with, and, purportedly, our emotional state. Communities across the country are fighting back.
In the hands of police and other government agencies, face recognition technology presents an inherent threat to our privacy, free expression, information security, and social justice. Our faces are unique identifiers that can’t be left at home, or replaced like a stolen ID or compromised password. The technology facilitates covert mass surveillance of the places we frequent, people we associate with, and, purportedly, our emotional state.
Fortunately, communities across the country are fighting back. In the three years since San Francisco passed its first-of-a-kind ban on government use of facial recognition, at least 16 more municipalities, from Oakland to Boston, have followed their lead. These local bans are necessary to protect residents from harms that are inseparable from municipal use of this dangerous technology.
The most effective of the existing bans on government face surveillance have crucial elements in common. They broadly define the technology, provide effective mechanisms for any community member to take legal enforcement action should the ordinance be violated, and limit the use of any information acquired in an inadvertent breach of the prohibition.
There are, however, important nuances in how each ordinance accomplishes these goals. Here we will identify the best features of 17 local bans on government use of face recognition. We hope this will help show authors of the next round how best to protect their communities.
Definition of “Face Recognition”
Particular consideration must be given in any tech-related legislation to define what tools and applications are, and are not, intended to be covered. Complicating that challenge is the need to define the relevant technology broadly enough to assure that emerging capabilities are suitably captured, while not inadvertently impacting technologies and applications that should not fall within the bill’s scope.
Here, many forms of government use of face recognition technology may present significant threats to essential civil liberties. They may also exacerbate bias. Today, the most widely deployed class of face recognition is often called “face matching.” This can be used for “face identification,” that is, an attempt to link photographs of unknown people to their real identities. For example, police might take a faceprint from a new image (e.g., taken by a surveillance camera) and compare it against a database of known faceprints (e.g., a government database of ID photos).
