Cambridge, Massachusetts Passes Ban On Facial Recognition Tech Use By Government Agencies
from the party-on,-faceblockers dept
Congratulations to Cambridge, Massachusetts for joining the banwagon! Cambridge joins three other communities in the state which have decided facial recognition tech is too risky, too invasive of privacy, and all-around bad news for their residents. Brookline, Somerville, and Northampton have also banned the tech, potentially leading the way for a statewide ban.
A bill before the State House would also establish a statewide moratorium on the use of facial recognition technology and other forms of biometric surveillance, including the analysis of a person’s gait or voice, until the legislature regulates the software.
These communities join their West Coast counterparts in making the tech unavailable to government agencies. San Francisco and Oakland both banned the tech recently. This was followed by a statewide ban that made these efforts (mostly) redundant. But not completely. The state ban only applies to cameras operated by law enforcement officers. The city bans block all city government agencies from deploying the tech.
There really isn't any good reason for any city or state to, at the very minimum, not pass a moratorium on facial recognition use. The tech is unproven. Specs vary widely between vendors, but most of the major offerings aren't exactly burning up the charts in terms of false positives. That's still a huge problem. But it's only one of the problems.
A large percentage of false positives also means the programs are prone to false negatives, which runs contrary to law enforcement assertions the tech will aid and abet in crime-solving. You need to be able to accurately identify people to do that and high miss rates don't exactly point to increased law enforcement efficiency.
Beyond that, the tech tends to show bias, some of which can be attributed to the people building the programs. The quality of the training inputs also matters, but the race to grab market share means speed is prized over accuracy. At this point, facial recognition tech is mostly known for getting things wrong and giving white males yet another reason to be grateful they're white and male.
Unfortunately, these efforts will probably be temporary. There's no way law enforcement agencies will go without this tech for long. And these agencies wield a great deal of power when it comes to crafting legislation, especially if they're represented by a union.
As heartening as it is to see these efforts come to fruition, the widespread deployment of facial recognition tech feels almost inevitable. Maybe it isn't. But state efforts won't do much to halt the ever-expanding plans of the federal government, which is very much interested to subjecting as many Americans as possible to biometric collections, all in the name of national security. But a groundswell of state efforts could halt this advance or, at the very least, slow the surveillance rush back to a creep.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: ban, cambridge, facial recognition, massachusetts
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
All
Re: “There really isn't any good reason for any city or state to, at the very minimum, not pass a moratorium on facial recognition use”.
Yes there is, because facial recognition is not all the same. Facial recognition to pick out people in a crowd is one thing, and arguably that should be banned. Facial recognition as a quick way for people to activate their iphone is completely different.
I don’t know why privacy advocates pretend that the only way forward is to ban both.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: All
What a great strawman you just tackled bro, congrats! It’s like the high school football prom you never had.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: All
Nope. It's same bad "security" practice used slightly differently. A computer can't tell the difference between a "live" event vs. a recording. Using your face to unlock anything is a bad security decision, as it will never be able to tell that one input is "you in this moment" VS. another input that is "some recording of you made to look like it's in this moment." Just ask any criminal who has hacked camera feeds to throw off investigators or incriminate a rival. Or ask any government that has deliberately altered video evidence to get their guy. The same is true for your phone.
Given enough time, the "random" gesture(s) it asks you to perform will reach their complexity limit, and you'll have an overlap that a recording exists for. Unless you feel like doing facial workouts while flailing your arms around for 20+ minutes just to get into your phone.
Because the easier it is to ID someone that way the greater the risk of abuse. As I just illustrated above, it's a flawed technology that can be abused easily with little benefit for the average person. There's no real reason to invest in further development at this time, beyond it's potential for abuse. Maybe once AI gets to the point that conversations with others is possible, but that's still quite a ways off yet. (And that may happen "naturally" if the AI is good enough anyway.)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: All
Any biometrics are really equivalent to a username, but marketing departments want everyone to think they are a password.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: All
"Any biometrics are really equivalent to a username, but marketing departments want everyone to think they are a password."
^This.
In order to obtain an actual passkey of any decent size and entropy you need to intrude far more severely on the subject's life (burglary, pickpocketing, the 5 dollar wrench attack, etc) than simply lifting fingerprints or snapping a photo or movie.
Biometrics as a security key just hits the "cheap" and "convenient" edge of the security triangle while leaving actual "security" out completely.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: All
"Yes there is, because facial recognition is not all the same. Facial recognition to pick out people in a crowd is one thing, and arguably that should be banned. Facial recognition as a quick way for people to activate their iphone is completely different. I don’t know why privacy advocates pretend that the only way forward is to ban both."
Because once you're on a suspect list no further questions will be asked how you got there? We've seen, ever since the GWB administration tried to automate no-fly and terrorist suspect list entries, that the amount of false positives is´high and the fallout VERY bad.
Now, if all your iPhone did when you tried to unlock it with your face was...unlocking your iPhone, then all is well. When it also signs you into the Apple store, and by extension, every software app using that verification...
...it just means programs such as PRISM end up locating whatever your face translates as in their list as <person A just located at GPS coordinates Y, doing activity Z>.
You unlocked that phone while walking down a street currently being surveilled by the DEA or the ATF - well congratulations, your name just got linked to drug deals or illegal arm sales.
So by all means, let's please ban any governmental use of facial recognition tech until there are sensible laws as to how that information may be utilized, especially when it comes to linking said information to the umpteen types of "suspect bucket lists" floating around the DHS.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Maybe a trend to keep pushing. Not just farcical recognition, but in general, cities could tell their PDs to grow the fuck up and learn to behave. You won't need court battles if the cops are properly regulated in the first place.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
"Ban", eh?
That's a pretty lame excuse for a ban.
There is no reason that private surveillance camera users should be allowed to have the kind of automated, mass face recognition they're talking about "banning", any more than government users. They're at least as likely to abuse it and even less accountable.
Nobody should be trying to connect names or any other information to any person who just enters a place where a camera happens to be pointed. Nor should anybody be shouldn't be using the video/images from surveillance to build any kind of face database or any other kind of database.
Only in the US would people miss the obvious fact that the impact is the same no matter who runs the system.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: "Ban", eh?
"That's a pretty lame excuse for a ban."
To which excuse do you refer?
The one about how it does not work?
Why should a municipality avoid the purchase of defective products?
The answers to these and more ...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The best part of this is that its not just facial recognition, but other biometrics too (gait, voice etc.). Good job.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
As if a person's life is static and never changes.
What are these idiots smoking?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]