San Francisco is edge closer to becoming the first American city tobanfacial acknowledgement surveillance , a booming technology that ’s a fast - growing business in the United States and strain to the core ofChina ’s high - tech authoritarianism .
A proposal to ban facial recognition from the metropolis as well as put up significant transparency and supervising requirements to buying or using other forms of surveillance was hear by a committee in the San Francisco ’s board of supervisors on Monday . The auditory modality included numerous supporters and critic but also one notable absence : law .
While civil liberty groups include the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are pushing the Stop Secret Surveillance Ordinance , the San Francisco Police Officers Association ( SFPOA ) has been opposing the bill and pushing its own supporters to send emails to lawgiver demanding the bill be vote out . SFPOA did not respond to a request for comment .
Photo: (Getty)
Supervisor Aaron Peskin , the San Francisco metropolis lawmaker who first introduced the statute law , said his office had been deluge with superposable emails that originated in a gust email from the Police Officers Association . Some of the emails still had blank spaces where name calling and neighborhoods were conjecture to be filled in .
The Police Officers Association crop with Stop Crime SF , a local crime - bar grouping proposing a one - year sunset article and exemptions for SFO airport , the city ’s port and Oracle Park where the San Francisco Giants toy baseball .
Here ’s a scan of the email the police constitution institutionalize to its patron , obtained by Gizmodo :
It should be noted that the legislation , which was first proposed almost three months ago , does n’t touch on homeowner who habituate video surveillance like Nest and Ring , or individual business owners with their own surveillance system of rules .
standardized legislation was introduce in the California body politic Senate but was defeated there due in large part to police opposition , Peskin said .
“ We can have good security measures without a protection commonwealth and we can have good policing without a police state , ” Peskin aver .
The San Francisco legislation arrives at a essential consequence in the account of rapidly nascent facial recognition technology .
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is reportedlyrushing to installface recognition technology at airports across the U.S. , where the surveillance tech is used attoll booths , sporting events , and evenTaylor Swift concerts . In China , the political science is using the technology totrackMuslim minorities . police force around that country are using facial recognition to track mark and makethousands of arrests .
In 2018 , Microsoft ’s chairwoman and chief legal military officer , Brad Smith , came out in favor of Union regulationof face recognition due to privacy and human rights pitfall .
“ We hold out in a country of laws , and the government needs to play an of import function in influence facial recognition engineering science , ” Smith wrote . “ As a world-wide rationale , it seems more sensible to ask an elected governing to regulate caller than to ask unelected companies to regulate such a government . ”
In the United States , most adults are in police facial recognition database , grant to a Georgetown Lawstudy . In addition to literary criticism that the technology aids and overdraw a ecumenical onerous surveillance state , many critic at Monday ’s earreach pointed to enquiry admonition that the applied science is bias against marginalized populations .
When a mathematical group of Amazon stockholder successfully struggle to get avoteon the possibleness of banning Amazon ’s sale of the technology to government agencies , they pointed to a 2018 ACLUstudyshowing Amazon Rekognition falsely matched 28 fellow member of Congress to mugshot picture . The error disproportionately bear upon multitude of color .
Facial RecognitionSan FranciscoSurveillance
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