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San Francisco is the first major city to ban the use of facial recognition by local government agencies, it has become a leader in regulatory technology, criticized for its potential to extend widespread government surveillance and to reinforce the prejudices of the police .
The "Stop Secret Surveillance" order was voted 8-1 by a vote of the City Supervisory Board on Tuesday. The order will put in place a complete ban on the use of facial surveillance by San Francisco City agencies, which high-tech companies such as Amazon and Microsoft are currently selling to various United States. government agencies, including in the case of Amazon, the US police and in the case of Microsoft, an American prison. These technologies can detect faces in images or live video streams and match these facial features to the identity of a person in a database.
Today, the Chinese government has made extensive use of facial recognition technology for Orwellian mass surveillance of ordinary citizens in public life – the most alarming to target the Uighur Muslim ethnic minority in what is known as "racism". automated ".
In the United States, tools are much less common but are becoming increasingly popular with law enforcement agencies. Dozens of local police departments in the United States use this technology to match driver's license photos and identity photos with criminal databases. It is also used (in some cases by citizens, not by the police) to monitor crowds at events such as demonstrations, shopping malls and concerts, in order to identify potential suspects in real time which alarmed civil liberties advocates. have a deterrent effect on freedom of expression.
This ban is just one aspect of the San Francisco supervisory oversight order, which will also require city agencies to seek approval from the city before purchasing other types of monitoring technologies. , such as automatic license plate readers and camera drones. This will not prevent individuals or businesses from using these facial recognition systems. (So, Taylor Swift, if you're reading this – you're still able to welcome San Francisco audiences with a facial scan.) And of course, the Franciscans of San every day can continue to willingly participate in a technology of ubiquitous facial recognition like the rest of us when we unlock our iPhones, or mark a friend suggested on a Facebook photo, for example.
Advancers of facial recognition technology say it has the ability to help police agencies identify and stop suspects more effectively, but critics cite examples of abuse that they say prove they can do more harm than good.
In a particularly egregious example, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) tested Amazon's facial recognition software and wrongly discovered that it incorrectly identified 28 black congressmen as criminals. MIT researchers found that, overall, the software had been less successful for women and people with darker skin (in both cases, Amazon challenged the results). And in places like Maryland, police departments have been accused of using facial recognition technology more generally in black communities and targeting activists – for example, the Baltimore police have used it to identify and arrest the demonstrators who killed Freddie Gray in the hands of the police. .
"The propensity of facial recognition technology to endanger civil rights and freedoms largely outweighs its so-called benefits," reads in the San Francisco prescription, written by the city's supervisor , Aaron Peskin, and five others on the board of directors made up of 11 people, "and the technology will exacerbate racial injustice and threaten our ability to live without continued government oversight".
Other cities follow the example of San Francisco. In the nearby town of Oakland, as well as throughout the country in Somerville, Massachusetts, the city council must rule on a bill implementing a similar ban.
"These orders transfer the power of law enforcement to the people and guarantee democratic debate and control," said Mana Azarmi, political advisor of the Center for Democracy and Technology. Azarmi praised San Francisco and Oakland as "avant-garde" in the development of legislation that constitutes a "unique accountability tool for end the secret surveillance ".
The San Francisco Bay Area is home to a strong network of civil liberties and racial justice groups. It is therefore not surprising that municipal governments have state-of-the-art technology regulations that could eliminate privacy and reinforce social inequalities.
But with tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook in a race to build an ubiquitous AI, this ban is a sign of something we do not see often: governments are trying to outpace Frankenstein's technological potential.
The order is not devoid of criticism, it attempts to oversee a complex network of public-private partnerships on surveillance technologies that is expected to evolve over time. Here is an overview of what he is really doing and the precedent he could create.
What the ban will do – and will not do – will
The face recognition ban will most directly limit the San Francisco Police Department, which does not currently use face recognition technology, but has already tested it. If the prescription is respected, SFPD will not be able to restart the tests of these tools. This means that they will not be able, for example, to connect security cameras installed on public streets to image processing technology and criminal snapshot databases.
In other cities, police departments have been the main advocates of facial recognition technology, claiming that it helped them in criminal investigations. In Washington County, Oregon, the sheriff's office said that Amazon's reconnaissance product had "dramatically increased the ability of our law enforcement officers to act quickly and decisively" in reducing the time needed to "identify criminal suspects" three to three days later. minutes, according to a testimonial on Amazon's customer site for the software.
It's easy to see the appeal of these tools. Although the SFPD has refrained from publicly supporting facial recognition (or disavowal), the ministry has called for legislative amendments that address the privacy concerns of technology "while balancing the concerns". of our growing international city ".
The order will also prevent the local police from sharing certain information with federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Matt Cagle, a lawyer specializing in technology and civil liberties at the ACLU. At a public hearing on the order, Cagle said that the immigration agency responsible for deporting undocumented migrants had already requested information from the police department from San Francisco. San Francisco is a sanctuary city, which means that in most cases it does not cooperate with federal agencies like ICE to deport unauthorized immigrants.
However, restrictions on surveillance technologies will not be applied at the San Francisco International Airport, where federal agencies such as the Transportation Security Administration and the Customs and Border Patrol have jurisdiction – and are free to use the control systems. facial recognition and biometric scanners as they please. (Of course, the public is also free to push back that too, and he did.)
At a recent public hearing, several San Francisco residents feared that this step would make it more difficult for local businesses to catch and deter thieves at the shelves. The new order allows private companies and citizens to share security camera images, including tools using facial recognition technologies, with the police to facilitate investigations. However, it describes the procedures for citizens to share these images.
Another criticism of the legislation is that it prevents local law enforcement agencies from using facial surveillance technology to identify alleged terrorists in mass acts, such as concerts and parades.
"Do we really want to say to all the white supremacists," Hey, San Francisco is organizing a lunar parade, but they are restricting security cameras, "said Frank Noto, president of STOP Crime SF, a grassroots group responsible for accountability. criminal case, during a recent public hearing on the order.
The spread to other cities
In many ways, San Francisco and California in general are creating a trend for urban areas of the country that are increasingly demanding increased monitoring of surveillance technology.
In 2016, the ACLU had launched the "Community Control on Police Supervision" effort aimed at providing a framework to local governments for the enactment of laws to improve police oversight. . Regional authorities in the Bay Area and cities such as Santa Clara County, Oakland and Berkeley were among the first countries to adopt such legislation.
"On a symbolic level, it is important to create the core of this technology in the San Francisco Bay Area and now we are putting regulations in place," said Brian Hofer, Chair of the Commission. the Oakland City Privacy Council, which will lead efforts to place a facial recognition ban there.
A little less than a dozen American cities – including Seattle, Nashville and Cambridge, Massachusetts – have passed laws using this framework to give their local officials more powers to regulate the use of the tools of monitoring. And about 20 other cities are actively working on similar legislation. In the meantime, many have called for federal legislation, including Microsoft, a leading provider of facial recognition technologies. But at least in the short term, a mosaic of local regulations seems more likely and achievable, according to researchers and privacy advocates on the ground.
US consumers may have voluntarily given up on their digital privacy expectations, while our appetite for smart devices to stay tuned, mobile location tracking technology and ever-piratable social media applications grows continuously. And until now, regulators have been largely slow and ineffective at combating this dependency or regulating privacy breaches.
But expecting to be able to cross the street without Big Brother knowing where you are is a civil liberty deeply rooted in American culture and prompting the government to use facial recognition technology before it's too late, said Hofer.
"This kind of technology is spreading so quickly in the private sector, but we still have the opportunity to keep the genie in the bottle by limiting their use by the government," he said.
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