San Francisco will veto the use of facial recognition as a surveillance tool

San Francisco will ban the use of facial recognition technology by the police and other public bodies, the first city in the United States to have adopted such a measure.

Eight of the nine city council members in the city of California spoke in favor of the new legislation, which will be officially approved next week and should be approved. "The propensity of facial recognition technology to endanger civil rights and freedoms greatly exceeds its benefits, "says the text.

Facial recognition could, moreover, "exacerbate racial injustice and threaten our ability to live without the constant vigilance of the government"

The prohibition is part of a broader regulation aimed at regulating surveillance systems and obliges municipal bodies wishing to use them to obtain prior authorization from city council.

"It will be illegal for any department to obtain, retain, access or use any facial recognition technology or any information obtained with facial recognition technology.", says one of the paragraphs of this voluminous document.

L & # 39; ban will not rule in airports from the city or other facilities regulated by the US federal government.

San Francisco is an epicenter of the US technology industry and hosts major companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Uber and Google.

Civil rights groups say the technology is overly encroaching on the privacy of citizens, while perpetuating the police bias against ethnic minorities, as it has been proven that it tends to commit more crimes. mistakes with dark-skinned people, that tech advocates make sure it can enhance security.

Stop Crime SF, a local organization, ensures that facial recognition "can help locate lost children, people with dementia and fight bad trafficking"

For its part, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has stated that facial recognition may, on the contrary, "be used pbadively without requiring the knowledge, consent or participation of the person". .

In China, authorities use facial recognition to identify Muslim minority of Uighurs, newspaper says New York Timesand increase the persecution against this ethnic group.

"This is not an anti-technology policy, it is to be able to demand the responsibility of the monitoring technology, to ensure its safe use," said the adviser in charge of the measure , Aaron Peskin, during the plenary session. that "you can have security without becoming a police state".

In this regard, Peskin cited the ACLU study conducted last July, which revealed that facial recognition incorrectly identified 28 members of the US Congress as criminals (mostly ethnic minorities) comparing his photographs with images of the police.

(With information from AFP and EFE)