A large coalition of advocacy groups focused on civil and human rights are pushing to ban the police from using facial recognition technology that they say could create an Orwellian surveillance state.
Over 40 organizations, including civil rights groups, universities, and government and technology accountability organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union, on Thursday, re-upped their call for a national ban on law enforcement use of facial recognition software.
Human rights nonprofit organization Amnesty International, on Thursday, specifically called for a ban on facial recognition technology in New York City after discovering that the local police department has access to more than 15,000 cameras which it can use to track people’s day-to-day movements and activities.
“You are never anonymous. Whether you’re attending a protest, walking to a particular neighborhood, or even just grocery shopping – your face can be tracked by facial recognition technology using imagery from thousands of camera points across New York,” Matt Mahmoudi, Artificial Intelligence & Human Rights Researcher at Amnesty International said in a statement.
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The groups say that most people do not know when they are being tracked by the technology and are having their privacy infringed upon without reasonable suspicion of criminal wrongdoing.
More than half of all U.S. adults are already in face recognition databases used for criminal investigations, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy & Technology.
Some local governments and large corporations have already chosen to ban the controversial technology, trying to set an example for others to follow.
Boston, Portland, San Francisco, and Minneapolis have all instituted bans on facial recognition technology. Earlier this week, King County in Washington state, home to Seattle, became the first county to ban government use of the technology. Some tech giants, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM, have also decided to put bans on selling facial recognition software to the police.
The advocacy organizations say they are particularly concerned about how face recognition systems disproportionately affect women and people with darker skin because of inaccuracies with the technology and a history of racial discrimination or marginalization by law enforcement.
“Facial recognition can and is being used by states to intentionally target certain individuals or groups of people based on characteristics, including ethnicity, race and gender, without individualized reasonable suspicion of criminal wrongdoing,” Mahmoudi said.
The advocacy groups said that despite improvements in facial recognition technology’s accuracy in recent months, there are fundamental problems with software in the context of law enforcement because of how it can be unfairly used by police departments.
The New York City Police Department said that its use of facial recognition is not invasive and is only used to compare still images from surveillance photos to mugshots, a spokesperson said in a statement to Politico.
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“No enforcement action is ever taken solely on the basis of a facial recognition match,” Sgt. Jessica McRorie, an NYPD spokeswoman, said.
