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SAN FRANCISCO – On Tuesday, the San Francisco supervisory board passed the first ban imposed by a major city to use facial recognition technology by the police and all other municipal agencies.
The vote was 8 to 1 in favor, with two members supporting the bill absent. There will be a second mandatory vote next week but this is perceived as a formality.
Police forces across America have begun to turn to face recognition to look for both minor suspects and perpetrators of massacres: authorities used technology to identify the gunman during mass slaughter in the United States. Annapolis newspaper, Maryland, in June. Civil liberties groups, however, have expressed concern over the potential abuse of the technology by the government, fearing to call on the United States to adopt an overly oppressive surveillance state.
Aaron Peskin, the city supervisor who announced the bill, said he was sending a particularly strong message to the country, coming from a city transformed by technology.
"I think that part of San Francisco is the real and perceived headquarters for everything related to technology, but also a responsibility for its local lawmakers," said Peskin, who represents the northeastern neighborhoods. from the city. "We have a disproportionate responsibility to regulate technological excesses, precisely because their headquarters are located here."
Similar bans are under consideration in Oakland and Somerville, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. In Massachusetts, a A bill introduced in the state legislature would impose a moratorium on facial recognition and other remote biometric surveillance systems. At Capitol Hill, a bill introduced last month would prohibit users of commercial facial recognition technologies from collecting and sharing data to identify or track consumers without their consent, although it does not address technology by the government.
Matt Cagle, a lawyer for the ACLU of Northern California, summarized on Tuesday the general concerns of critics: "Facial recognition technology," he said, "gives the government unprecedented power to track people in their daily life is incompatible with a healthy democracy. "
The San Francisco proposal, he added, "is truly forward-looking and aims to prevent the unleashing of this dangerous technology against the public."
In one form or another, facial recognition is already used in many US airports and major stadiums, as well as by a number of other police services. The pop star Taylor Swift would have integrated technology at one of his concerts, using it for help identify stalkers.
The issue was particularly criticized in San Francisco, a city rich in history of dissent and individual freedoms, but which has also suffered lately from high rates of property crime. A local group called Stop Crime SF has asked supervisors to exclude local prosecutors, police and sheiffs from the order when performing investigative tasks, as well as to 39, an exemption for the airport.
The group encouraged residents to send a template letter to supervisors. He argued that the "order" could have unintended consequences that would reduce our security by severely restricting the use of effective traditional video surveillance by burying agencies such as the police department in a process of Bureaucratic approval ".
The battle for facial recognition in San Francisco is largely theoretical: the police service does not currently deploy facial recognition technology, except at its airport and ports under federal jurisdiction and not affected by legislation.
According to Jennifer Friedenbach, Executive Director of the Coalition on Homelessness, some local homeless shelters use biometric fingerprints and photos to track the use of shelters. This practice drove the undocumented out of shelters, she added.
Mr. Cagle and other experts said it was difficult to know exactly how widespread the technology was in the United States. "Basically, governments and businesses have been very secretive about its use. The public is therefore unaware of the current state of affairs, "he said.
But Dave Maas, senior researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has presented a partial list of police services using technology, including Las Vegas, Orlando, San Jose, San Diego, New York, Boston, Detroit and Durham, N.C.
Other users, Maas said, include the Colorado Department of Public Safety, the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, the California Department of Justice, and the Virginia State Police.
US customs and border protection services now use facial recognition at many US airports and ports of entry. At airports, international travelers stand in front of the cameras and compare their photos to those provided in their passport applications. The agency says the process is in line with privacy laws, but that's still the criticism of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which says the government, while promising travelers to disengage, has made the task more and more difficult.
But there is a broader concern. "When you have the opportunity to follow people in a physical space, everyone is subject to government oversight," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the group.
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