Prisons Across the US Are Quietly Building Databases of Incarcerated People's Voice Prints (theintercept.com)

In New York and other states across the country, authorities are acquiring technology to extract and digitize the voices of incarcerated people into unique biometric signatures, known as voice prints. From a report: Prison authorities have quietly enrolled hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people's voice prints into large-scale biometric databases. Computer algorithms then draw on these databases to identify the voices taking part in a call and to search for other calls in which the voices of interest are detected. Some programs, like New York's, even analyze the voices of call recipients outside prisons to track which outsiders speak to multiple prisoners regularly.

Corrections officials representing the states of Texas, Florida, and Arkansas, along with Arizona's Yavapai and Pinal counties; Alachua County, Florida; and Travis County, Texas, also confirmed that they are actively using voice recognition technology today. And a review of contracting documents identified other jurisdictions that have acquired similar voice-print capture capabilities: Connecticut and Georgia state corrections officials have signed contracts for the technology

Authorities and prison technology companies say this mass biometric surveillance supports prison security and fraud prevention efforts. But civil liberties advocates argue that the biometric buildup has been neither transparent nor consensual. Some jurisdictions, for example, limit incarcerated people's phone access if they refuse to enroll in the voice recognition system, while others enroll incarcerated people without their knowledge. Once the data exists, they note, it could potentially be used by other agencies, without any say from the public.

Comments

Re:Being in prison isn't consensual?

[ranton]

I mean, you read the last part of TFS, but what about the rest? Did you miss this part?

"Some programs, like New York's, even analyze the voices of call recipients outside prisons to track which outsiders speak to multiple prisoners regularly."

Good point, I had forgotten about that part of the summary when I read the last paragraph. I have never called someone in prison, but if there isn't some kind of "this call is being monitored and reviewed by prison officials and other agencies ..." message at the beginning of the call then I agree there is a problem. IANAL, but a quick Google search seems to confirm there is no reasonable expectation of privacy during a prison phone call, at least in Florida (the first article I found). Which is what I would expect.