Facial recognition is a complicated and controversial technology. There are clearly privacy concerns with technology that can track you anywhere without your consent. Private companies could target ads to you based on a camera in a storefront. There are also safety concerns. Stalkers have used their position at companies like Google Maps and Uber to track their victims. Imagine how bad this could be if every storefront had a camera in it, reporting back to ad agencies and sharing that data with Google, Facebook, Amazon, and virtually every other retailer.
There’s another safety concern as well, and it’s also one that white men don’t have to worry about as much: policing. Facial recognition is horribly inaccurate when it comes to women and anyone non-white. Predominantly white men designed and tested the systems, and forgot to take everyone else into account. It’s far more complex than that, but at a simplistic level, that’s what happened. Now, all of our facial recognition is tainted with racial and gender bias. That bias can lead police to make wrongful arrests, harassing people who likely already see elevated police suspicion.
Which is exactly why we cannot allow it to become widespread.
Portland just passed the strictest anti-facial recognition law in the U.S. Unlike those in San Francisco, Oakland, and Boston, this one covers both the public sector (governments, police, etc), as well as the private sector (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc). It’s the first one in the nation to put privacy and security first, before profits and over-policing.
Portland’s New Law
First and foremost, yes, your phone will still have Face ID and other facial authentication systems. Facial authentication in general is not covered. This only involves facial recognition used to identify and track individuals in public spaces, where they could not consent to companies or the government tracking them. The new laws also won’t prevent individuals from using facial recognition on their own property, so your door security camera is safe. However, that does mean that businesses could employ facial recognition within their own buildings or stores as well.
The two ordinances that make up the new law specifically mention bias and privacy in their reasoning.
“No one should have something as private as their face photographed, stored, and sold to third parties for a profit. No one should be unfairly thrust into the criminal justice system because the tech algorithm misidentified an innocent person.”
– Jo Ann Hardesty, Portland City Council Commissioner
In the private sector, there’s nothing to do to improve the privacy of facial recognition. It will always function as a way to track and sell your location. However, if facial recognition improves, it could become a valuable tool for law enforcement. We’re many years away from removing the bias baked into our systems though. For the time being, the only way to protect people until the technology is free of bias is to ban it.
The first ordinance is currently active, that which bans public use of facial recognition for government purposes. The second, which bans private use of facial recognition, goes into effect on January 1st, 2021.
Portland is showing other cities around the world how to respect the privacy and safety of its citizens. Hopefully other cities follow their example.
Sources:
- Taylor Hatmaker, Techcrunch
- Mariella Moon, Engadget
- Jay Peters, The Verge