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New Proposal Would Ban Government Facial Recognition Use In San Francisco (sfexaminer.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The San Francisco Examiner: San Francisco could be the first city in the nation to ban city agencies from using facial recognition surveillance technology under proposed legislation announced Tuesday by Supervisor Aaron Peskin. The legislation, which will be introduced at Tuesday's Board of Supervisors meeting, echoes ordinances adopted by cities including Oakland and Berkeley, as well as by the transit agency BART, that require legislative approval before city agencies or law enforcement adopt new surveillance technologies or policies for the use of existing technologies. However, the new proposal takes things a step further with an outright ban on facial recognition technology.
The San Francisco proposal would not only ban facial recognition but would also require the Board of Supervisors to approve new surveillance technology in general. The board would have to find that the benefits of the technology outweigh the costs, that civil rights will be protected and that the technology will not disparately impact a community or group. Peskin portrayed the proposal to be introduced Tuesday as an extension of his "Privacy First Policy," approved by voters in November, which sets new limits and transparency requirements on the collection and use of personal data by companies doing business with The City.
The San Francisco proposal would not only ban facial recognition but would also require the Board of Supervisors to approve new surveillance technology in general. The board would have to find that the benefits of the technology outweigh the costs, that civil rights will be protected and that the technology will not disparately impact a community or group. Peskin portrayed the proposal to be introduced Tuesday as an extension of his "Privacy First Policy," approved by voters in November, which sets new limits and transparency requirements on the collection and use of personal data by companies doing business with The City.
San Francisco does something smart for a change. Very odd.
You misspelled fecal.
In order to avoid accidentally catching illegals on camera, we're just going to flat-out eliminate the possibility of catching terrorists
The agencies most likely to use this technology have already outsourced most of this kind of work to "vendors".
Remember E.S.? He wasn't working for the government. Also Police already drive around with license plate readers, which are much more accurate for finding people.
Oh, and if any civilian takes a picture and posts it online, it will be collected and analyzed anyway, you might as well outlaw all phones and cameras.
Good luck with that!
In other words, we couldn't possibly let it disrupt our view that we're all the same and just the same cast wearing different skins.
Who is more likely to rape a young child based on arrest rates? A middle age white male or a 19 year old black male? The former. Who is more likely to hold up a convenience store at gun point? The latter.
Maybe there are a lot of uncaught black child sex offenders. Maybe white males are getting away with robbery more.
If you want to Fucking Love Science and talk about how you are driven by data and evidence then accept the fact that different crimes tend to skew to different communities and that simplistic "that's racist" explanations don't cut it outside of an emotional response.
It's not an absolute ban, FR use would require city application, justification and approval.
Some how I suspect the politicians will help monetize the security feeds at Walmart/grocery and liquor stores, with the appropriate friends and contributions, while screwing the citizens over crimes and Invasion, home and international...
Police need the new advance tools to track criminals and find illegal migrants.
To enforce city and state laws.
Why should a criminal or illegal migrant get privacy in a state?
A criminal and illegal migrant should expect to be in a lot of federal and state/city gov/police shared database systems.
CCTV should get the faces of people doing crime.
Of the illegal migrant getting city/state services.
Facial recognition works quickly and well to detect people trying for extra city support, services.
To scan for past sanctuary city issued ID to illegal migrants.
To detect fake, shared and altered ID attempts.
To ensure an illegal migrant is not trying to use one ID to create a series of other federal, state and city ID.
To match one ID to one face and to ensure the same ID details is not connected to many other criminals, illegal migrants.
To ensure education and that that approved professional identification stays with the one qualified person.
Who is living in an RV on a street? Who is placing trash and waste all over a street? Who is living in a tent city?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Ban all facial recognition in public places, only legally allowed within private spaces and to be only used by the company at that private space and not across others, shared or sold and to be deleted once the identity process has been completed.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The tools that government agents use ARE in fact restricted by law. A nuclear bomb is a hell of a countermeasure against a riot, yet local police agencies aren't permitted to own nuclear weapons. Same goes for things like nerve gas.
That's a weird way to do things.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Commercial surveillance is much more efficient. The government can just procure the data from them at any time.
Pity, a little nerve gas would go a long way to calm down the unhinged wingnuts, wouldn't it?
It private industry can still do it, they'll collect whatever data the government needs and sell it to them, or perform things like access control using facial recognition. So this is just a revenue generating law for private industry, not unlike the laws requiring official dealers to sell cars and preventing the manufacturers from doing so.
Unless of course the law prevents the government to have access to absolutely anything that has facial recognition, then just add facial recognition to any system you want the government to never be able to search or seize. I somehow doubt the law till go that far.
The feds don't need the City's permission to do anything, so local law enforcement will just ask the feds to do their dirty work for them and use parallel construction to manufacture a cause for arrest.
This seems a bit extreme, which is unsurprising for Peskin.
I'd rather see strict limits and actual citizen oversight than an outright ban. There are legitimate uses for facial recognition, like helping to locate people who have arrest warrants outstanding, or maybe they could use it to help figure out who the repeat offenders are in San Francisco's massive car break in problem.
Why are Americans so quick to freak out when the government does things like this which can actually cut crime and save lives. Yet when corporations do it in the interest of pestering people and invading their lives for profit, nobody bats an eye? I'd much rather open my communications to the NSA/FBI than Facebook, Google, Uber, and Huawei.
Is Facial Recognition Tech really does anything different than replacing people who do the same job?
Is it bad, because it does the same job, even better & much faster & cheaper than any human can?
Why privacy is not a problem, when a human does the same job?
Who goes any public places & expects privacy really?
Aren't we living in times, pretty much everybody carrying phones w/ built-in (video) cameras?
Who really expects/wants privacy?
IMHO, that is not really the public, but all kinds of criminals hiding among the public!
If all public places have cameras w/ Facial Recognition Tech, criminals are the people who would really have big problem, not public!
IMHO, the people, who are fiercely keep trying to stop Facial Recognition Tech, are really trying to help criminals, not public!
Keep screaming "PRIVACY! PRIVACY! PRIVACY!" is just their mask!!!
(Is the public really chose them to represent the public (thru a referendum)? No! They just pretending they representing what the public wants!)
There's still bluetooth/wi-fi snooping, voice recognition, gait recognition and license-plate readers. One day, the government will snoop on credit-card readers and fingerprint/eyeball scanners.
Unhinged wingnut identified!
9/11 was just the cap on a long list of preventable tragedies caused mostly by politics rather than common sense.
You know what the best way to reduce alcoholism is? Stress reduction and either a positive support network or mental health options. That reduces or eliminates the need for Prohibition, Drunk driving checkpoints, and MADD in general.
Best way to stop drug related crime? Legalize all drugs, provide cheap clinically pure and regulated dosages. Arrest and charge anyone selling low quality knockoffs. The economics will handle themselves. Doing this will also allow treatment to be less stigmatized helping keep fewer junkies out in the world fucking things up. Not all of them, but the rest fall under the mental health initiative above.
Columbine. Gee, mental health again. Also helps reduce the need for all these excess gun regulations when you TAKE CARE OF PEOPLES MENTAL STATE. Sure a few loonies might get through, but good mental health, a same culture promoting responsible violence only in defense of the safety of yourself or others against a lethally violent aggressor, and a well armed populace will deter or minimize the damage of the majority of violent encounters. Combined with personal recording devices, we can even handle the situations where there is an abuse of people, or false claim of self defense. It will still require a cultural shift in our law enforcement and judicial apparatus to make it the fair and impartial system it was espoused to be (but has never in practice actually achieved!), but it would have the potential as a finishing blow to solving privacy, personal responsibility, and freedom to use or do what you like so long as it doesn't harm another.
Seriously though, mental health first.
Generally the wingnuts in my toolchest don't have hinges. Seems like a bit of a kludgy thing to tack on. /s
Facial recognition is a great way to bring an end to illegal immigration.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this is being pushed by facial recognition tech companies who want to setup their own data mining systems and sell the movement data. In that respect the government would only be dealing with peoples' location, not their facial scans. Thus they prevent the government from becoming a competitor and get all the people to think that those extra cameras are only basic security cameras.
Uh....where would you allow facial recognition to be used by a government??
The only acceptable answer here is 'no where'
So would Face ID become illegal?
Or will they just ban "bad" use of facial recognition?
How about voice recognition? Shall we ban that too? Yeah, get rid of Siri and Google Assistant!
They're for quick release!