10 ms·

San Francisco bans facial recognition technology by municipal agencies

199 points by dcschelt 7y ago

Klonoar 7y ago
Removed comment, because child comment has a good point that I somehow 100% missed~
- caprese 7y ago
  > ban on the use of facial recognition technology by police and all other municipal agencies I'm not even sure if the article is what you responded to Private sector and their partners can all still use it
  - thwythwy 7y ago
    Really sad the Times is just an outlet for what amounts to a symbolic nothingburger.
- kbenson 7y ago
  It's inevitable that San Francisco (and other parts of the bay area), which like to be on the forefront of certain rights issues will occasionally run up against the interests of some of the repercussions of the technology developed in the area, as technology stresses different areas of rights and the law. Ideally, SF is just a testing ground for something enacted at a state level that's a bit better worded and more comprehensive, and that in turn is a testing ground for some national legislation that works even better. I mean, that's how it's supposed to work, even if it feels like it rarely does. I've been waiting for something like that to happen on the front of ownership of personal information and online tracking for years. Looks like it's finally getting a bit more attention, but who knows if something useful will come out of it.
tuxxy 7y ago
I'm happy to see this, but it's not really going to stop the inevitable rise of the police state. They _will_ find other methods that aren't using facial recognition technology. I hear that gait recognition is quite accurate.
- Causality1 7y ago
  Who needs biometrics when they can track your phone just by asking nicely?
  - thinkcontext 7y ago
    But they need to know who to track. I believe they can get phones from a certain area but need a warrant.
- duxup 7y ago
  No one step will stop a police state, but many small things may. Democracies operate in small steps rather than broad strokes like totalitarian states.
- fenwick67 7y ago
  I'll have to remember to skip while jaywalking
  - jacques_chester 7y ago
    It's becoming possible to accurately estimate anthropometry from any footage of a person moving, so this still identifies you.
    - lozaning 7y ago
      Would putting like rocks or small tacks in my shoes be enough to throw this off?
      - Aromasin 7y ago
        Start walking barefoot maybe? You'll stop heel striking and will likely change gait completely. People will also start to think you're loony too, which has it's ups and downs.
      - jacques_chester 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
MagicPropmaker 7y ago
...by the Police and municipalities. Amazon, etc, can still use it in their "grab and go" stores.
- daflksdlsdf 7y ago
  Amazon isn't using facial recognition in their "grab and go" stores. Predictably, it's somehow worse than that, though.
- paxy 7y ago
  IN their stores, not outside on the streets.
  - gojomo 7y ago
    I don't think this legislation bans use of face-recognition by individuals & private entities in public. Only by the city agencies themselves.
  - filoleg 7y ago
    Why not? Afaik outside of the store is a public property, and anyone can set up a camera there and record with zero issues, since recording anything on public property is a fair game.
arcticbull 7y ago
This really feels like attacking the symptoms not the problem. Shouldn't the city, state and federal government develop guidelines on what can and can't be done with this information and ensure lack of abuse? You're in public, you have no expectation of privacy -- whether the video is assessed by computers or an army of humans, does it matter? Don't human viewers have 'facial recognition technology'? Progress can't be stuffed back into the bottle, but it does need to be guided and controlled. It feels very SF these days, sad to say, to long for the good old days by placing the collective head into the collective sand (as with allowing new/taller buildings to be built). Technology is neutral, what matters is what we do with it.
- jasaloo 7y ago
  the point is to prevent the capture of such data to begin with. As a privacy activist, we've seen that simply developing a 'use-policy,' while effective, can only go so far. Once local/state/fed authorities possess this data, it's a matter of when, not if, it will be abused (or sold off to private interests). Your second question: there's a massive difference between being observed by an individual officer and being perpetually tracked by an apparatus of ubiquitous cameras that cross-reference your face with your background information, possible criminal record, citizenship status, etc. It also opens the flood gates for horrific scenarios like the 'social credit system' that they've implemented in China. Go look that one up and tell me you're still ok with facial recognition.
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    I spent a lot of time researching the social credit system and yeah, not a fan -- it's basically gameified totalitarianism. However, again, I think that's about what you do with the ability and not the ability itself. You don't need facial recognition to implement the social credit system: a simple plastic card would do. Your first name, middle initial and last name as a triple are enough to uniquely identify you on the Texas voting registry 80% of the time [1]. This ship has long sailed. That's again why I'm in favor of regulating the problematic uses of information and technology and not addressing the specific technology or method of implementation. [1] https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/agdn_v1_4.pdf https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/agdn_v1_4...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ztratar 7y ago
Were citizens having trouble with this in SF? I live in SF and have never seen police use facial recognition, nor have I seen anyone have a problem with it's use at a Governmental level. Could that happen? Sure. But SF Board of Supervisors have SO MANY REALLY BAD PROBLEMS they need to be solving. Instead they are choosing to be pro-active legislating against tech (because they hate tech, let's admit it). Pro-active legislation is something that should be higher level -- state senate, federal, etc. Local politicians should be listening to their constituents to determine their priorities. They need to get off their butts and solve our homelessness problem with the $50k per homeless individual they now have in their yearly budget. Why do I still see crap all over the streets? Why do I feel like I'm going to be attacked when I'm in the streets? Some guy stabbed himself with a knife right buy the Caltrain station last year. If that was an isolated event, I wouldn't have a problem. Their priorities are so out of whack.
- non_sequitur 7y ago
  Nope - from the article "The facial recognition fight in San Francisco is largely theoretical — the police department does not currently deploy facial recognition technology, except in its airport and ports that are under federal jurisdiction and are not impacted by the legislation." Drugs, homelessness, human feces, insane housing prices -- well at least we can solve theoretical facial recognition
  - ztratar 7y ago
    Exactly. When you can't get anything useful done, pass a law that's arbitrarily populist and pat yourself on the back.
  - scottlegrand2 7y ago
    And yet no efforts at fecal recognition...
    - non_sequitur 7y ago
      Probably not that hard to build a fecal recognition model, it's what comes after that's more difficult. "It's like Uber for scooping"
arjo129 7y ago
I know that my opinion is going to be unpopular but I strongly disagree with this move. I can understand not allowing facial recognition to be run in real time, or for instance to ban corporates from tracking me and using my face for advertisement data, but to ban the police seems extremely dumb. Facial recognition can be used to significantly cut down investigation times and costs and thus reduce the stress on police.
- jasaloo 7y ago
  I can understand that viewpoint. But if we look at the track record of how authorities actually use surveillance technology, it is aggressively used to squash dissent, rather than prevent/investigate crimes. Yes, facial recognition could help cops identify a robber more quickly and yes surveillance has been used to expedite investigations, but what we've seen is that cops across the board will disproportionately abuse this sort of technology to track and monitor (and sometimes later harass) protesters, activists, ethnic/religious minorities and the undocumented. Here's one instance at the federal level, but abuse happens at the state and local level constantly. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/10/standing-rock-fbi-investigation-dakota-access https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/10/standing-roc...
  - philwelch 7y ago
    I wouldn’t be surprised if accurate facial recognition technology actually cut down on things like overt racial profiling.
    - jasaloo 7y ago
      yeah, maybe... but the question is always 'at what cost?' There are ways of cutting down on racial profiling that don't require turning our city into a panopticon.
- guelo 7y ago
  There's no need to create the matrix in the name of security. Crime is historically low. Police have been able to do their jobs without this tool. Once the police have the tools it will be abused. Everytime. Stop it.
jasaloo 7y ago
seeing plenty of comments along the lines of "don't they have better things to do?" please remember that there are coalitions of activists advocating multiple issues for civil rights simultaneously, and that a victory in one area (e.g. fighting the surveillance state) is neither mutually exclusive nor to the detriment of another equal or greater social ill (e.g. homelessness). In the meantime, enjoy these videos of what they're doing with facial recognition in China: (Social credit system) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkw15LkZ_Kw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkw15LkZ_Kw (broad piece on facial recognition): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH2gMNrUuEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH2gMNrUuEY
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
narrator 7y ago
I think the idea behind opposition to facial recognition is it makes law enforcement too efficient. Facial recognition is a threat to administrative bloat because it improves the efficiency of the police and would actually reduce all those crises that are leading to higher salaries for administrators tasked with solving those oh so lucrative problems that are created by gaps in law enforcement.
yurasuckrr 7y ago
I sure the air port will continue gathering all the facial data it wants. As will every federal agency and state agency
MagicPropmaker 7y ago
Gait recognition is pretty effective, too! https://nypost.com/2018/11/06/chinas-latest-recognition-technology-can-id-people-by-how-they-walk/ https://nypost.com/2018/11/06/chinas-latest-recognition-tech... And that's perfectly OK according to the SF City Council.
- ultrarunner 7y ago
  These people are politicans. You can’t possibly expect them to keep up with every new technological advancement.
- jtr1 7y ago
  Genuine question: is there a clean, higher-level abstraction at which a ban like this could be implemented?
dqpb 7y ago
I think it' useful to divide this into two separate issues: - information - information asymmetry
toephu2 7y ago
"San Francisco bans facial recognition technology by municipal agencies" They weren't even using it in the first place. I wish they were. More criminals could be caught.
prepend 7y ago
Perhaps this will help with the piles of human excrement.
GarrisonPrime 7y ago
Don't worry. They'll just hire private contractors to do it.
- BlackRing 7y ago
  That loophole of govt getting things from third parties without due process needs to be plugged.
megous 7y ago
Meanwhile other countries are already fining people for avoiding camera's gaze and forcing them to be photographed. And it's just a pilot project. https://twitter.com/JamieJBartlett/status/1128657365090361344 https://twitter.com/JamieJBartlett/status/112865736509036134...
humanExcrement 7y ago
human excrement You mean like yourself, you fucking piece of shit?

199 points by dcschelt 7y ago

Klonoar 7y ago

Removed comment, because child comment has a good point that I somehow 100% missed~

caprese 7y ago
> ban on the use of facial recognition technology by police and all other municipal agencies I'm not even sure if the article is what you responded to Private sector and their partners can all still use it
- thwythwy 7y ago
  Really sad the Times is just an outlet for what amounts to a symbolic nothingburger.
kbenson 7y ago
It's inevitable that San Francisco (and other parts of the bay area), which like to be on the forefront of certain rights issues will occasionally run up against the interests of some of the repercussions of the technology developed in the area, as technology stresses different areas of rights and the law. Ideally, SF is just a testing ground for something enacted at a state level that's a bit better worded and more comprehensive, and that in turn is a testing ground for some national legislation that works even better. I mean, that's how it's supposed to work, even if it feels like it rarely does. I've been waiting for something like that to happen on the front of ownership of personal information and online tracking for years. Looks like it's finally getting a bit more attention, but who knows if something useful will come out of it.

tuxxy 7y ago

I'm happy to see this, but it's not really going to stop the inevitable rise of the police state. They _will_ find other methods that aren't using facial recognition technology. I hear that gait recognition is quite accurate.

Causality1 7y ago
Who needs biometrics when they can track your phone just by asking nicely?
- thinkcontext 7y ago
  But they need to know who to track. I believe they can get phones from a certain area but need a warrant.
duxup 7y ago
No one step will stop a police state, but many small things may. Democracies operate in small steps rather than broad strokes like totalitarian states.
fenwick67 7y ago
I'll have to remember to skip while jaywalking
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  It's becoming possible to accurately estimate anthropometry from any footage of a person moving, so this still identifies you.
  - lozaning 7y ago
    Would putting like rocks or small tacks in my shoes be enough to throw this off?
    - Aromasin 7y ago
      Start walking barefoot maybe? You'll stop heel striking and will likely change gait completely. People will also start to think you're loony too, which has it's ups and downs.
    - jacques_chester 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

MagicPropmaker 7y ago

...by the Police and municipalities. Amazon, etc, can still use it in their "grab and go" stores.

daflksdlsdf 7y ago
Amazon isn't using facial recognition in their "grab and go" stores. Predictably, it's somehow worse than that, though.
paxy 7y ago
IN their stores, not outside on the streets.
- gojomo 7y ago
  I don't think this legislation bans use of face-recognition by individuals & private entities in public. Only by the city agencies themselves.
- filoleg 7y ago
  Why not? Afaik outside of the store is a public property, and anyone can set up a camera there and record with zero issues, since recording anything on public property is a fair game.

arcticbull 7y ago

This really feels like attacking the symptoms not the problem. Shouldn't the city, state and federal government develop guidelines on what can and can't be done with this information and ensure lack of abuse? You're in public, you have no expectation of privacy -- whether the video is assessed by computers or an army of humans, does it matter? Don't human viewers have 'facial recognition technology'? Progress can't be stuffed back into the bottle, but it does need to be guided and controlled. It feels very SF these days, sad to say, to long for the good old days by placing the collective head into the collective sand (as with allowing new/taller buildings to be built). Technology is neutral, what matters is what we do with it.

jasaloo 7y ago
the point is to prevent the capture of such data to begin with. As a privacy activist, we've seen that simply developing a 'use-policy,' while effective, can only go so far. Once local/state/fed authorities possess this data, it's a matter of when, not if, it will be abused (or sold off to private interests). Your second question: there's a massive difference between being observed by an individual officer and being perpetually tracked by an apparatus of ubiquitous cameras that cross-reference your face with your background information, possible criminal record, citizenship status, etc. It also opens the flood gates for horrific scenarios like the 'social credit system' that they've implemented in China. Go look that one up and tell me you're still ok with facial recognition.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  I spent a lot of time researching the social credit system and yeah, not a fan -- it's basically gameified totalitarianism. However, again, I think that's about what you do with the ability and not the ability itself. You don't need facial recognition to implement the social credit system: a simple plastic card would do. Your first name, middle initial and last name as a triple are enough to uniquely identify you on the Texas voting registry 80% of the time [1]. This ship has long sailed. That's again why I'm in favor of regulating the problematic uses of information and technology and not addressing the specific technology or method of implementation. [1] https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/agdn_v1_4.pdf https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/agdn_v1_4...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ztratar 7y ago

Were citizens having trouble with this in SF? I live in SF and have never seen police use facial recognition, nor have I seen anyone have a problem with it's use at a Governmental level. Could that happen? Sure. But SF Board of Supervisors have SO MANY REALLY BAD PROBLEMS they need to be solving. Instead they are choosing to be pro-active legislating against tech (because they hate tech, let's admit it). Pro-active legislation is something that should be higher level -- state senate, federal, etc. Local politicians should be listening to their constituents to determine their priorities. They need to get off their butts and solve our homelessness problem with the $50k per homeless individual they now have in their yearly budget. Why do I still see crap all over the streets? Why do I feel like I'm going to be attacked when I'm in the streets? Some guy stabbed himself with a knife right buy the Caltrain station last year. If that was an isolated event, I wouldn't have a problem. Their priorities are so out of whack.

non_sequitur 7y ago
Nope - from the article "The facial recognition fight in San Francisco is largely theoretical — the police department does not currently deploy facial recognition technology, except in its airport and ports that are under federal jurisdiction and are not impacted by the legislation." Drugs, homelessness, human feces, insane housing prices -- well at least we can solve theoretical facial recognition
- ztratar 7y ago
  Exactly. When you can't get anything useful done, pass a law that's arbitrarily populist and pat yourself on the back.
- scottlegrand2 7y ago
  And yet no efforts at fecal recognition...
  - non_sequitur 7y ago
    Probably not that hard to build a fecal recognition model, it's what comes after that's more difficult. "It's like Uber for scooping"

arjo129 7y ago

I know that my opinion is going to be unpopular but I strongly disagree with this move. I can understand not allowing facial recognition to be run in real time, or for instance to ban corporates from tracking me and using my face for advertisement data, but to ban the police seems extremely dumb. Facial recognition can be used to significantly cut down investigation times and costs and thus reduce the stress on police.

jasaloo 7y ago
I can understand that viewpoint. But if we look at the track record of how authorities actually use surveillance technology, it is aggressively used to squash dissent, rather than prevent/investigate crimes. Yes, facial recognition could help cops identify a robber more quickly and yes surveillance has been used to expedite investigations, but what we've seen is that cops across the board will disproportionately abuse this sort of technology to track and monitor (and sometimes later harass) protesters, activists, ethnic/religious minorities and the undocumented. Here's one instance at the federal level, but abuse happens at the state and local level constantly. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/10/standing-rock-fbi-investigation-dakota-access https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/10/standing-roc...
- philwelch 7y ago
  I wouldn’t be surprised if accurate facial recognition technology actually cut down on things like overt racial profiling.
  - jasaloo 7y ago
    yeah, maybe... but the question is always 'at what cost?' There are ways of cutting down on racial profiling that don't require turning our city into a panopticon.
guelo 7y ago
There's no need to create the matrix in the name of security. Crime is historically low. Police have been able to do their jobs without this tool. Once the police have the tools it will be abused. Everytime. Stop it.

jasaloo 7y ago

seeing plenty of comments along the lines of "don't they have better things to do?" please remember that there are coalitions of activists advocating multiple issues for civil rights simultaneously, and that a victory in one area (e.g. fighting the surveillance state) is neither mutually exclusive nor to the detriment of another equal or greater social ill (e.g. homelessness). In the meantime, enjoy these videos of what they're doing with facial recognition in China: (Social credit system) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkw15LkZ_Kw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkw15LkZ_Kw (broad piece on facial recognition): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH2gMNrUuEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH2gMNrUuEY

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

narrator 7y ago

I think the idea behind opposition to facial recognition is it makes law enforcement too efficient. Facial recognition is a threat to administrative bloat because it improves the efficiency of the police and would actually reduce all those crises that are leading to higher salaries for administrators tasked with solving those oh so lucrative problems that are created by gaps in law enforcement.

yurasuckrr 7y ago

I sure the air port will continue gathering all the facial data it wants. As will every federal agency and state agency

MagicPropmaker 7y ago

Gait recognition is pretty effective, too! https://nypost.com/2018/11/06/chinas-latest-recognition-technology-can-id-people-by-how-they-walk/ https://nypost.com/2018/11/06/chinas-latest-recognition-tech... And that's perfectly OK according to the SF City Council.

ultrarunner 7y ago
These people are politicans. You can’t possibly expect them to keep up with every new technological advancement.
jtr1 7y ago
Genuine question: is there a clean, higher-level abstraction at which a ban like this could be implemented?

dqpb 7y ago

I think it' useful to divide this into two separate issues: - information - information asymmetry

toephu2 7y ago

"San Francisco bans facial recognition technology by municipal agencies" They weren't even using it in the first place. I wish they were. More criminals could be caught.

prepend 7y ago

Perhaps this will help with the piles of human excrement.

GarrisonPrime 7y ago

Don't worry. They'll just hire private contractors to do it.

BlackRing 7y ago
That loophole of govt getting things from third parties without due process needs to be plugged.

megous 7y ago

Meanwhile other countries are already fining people for avoiding camera's gaze and forcing them to be photographed. And it's just a pilot project. https://twitter.com/JamieJBartlett/status/1128657365090361344 https://twitter.com/JamieJBartlett/status/112865736509036134...

humanExcrement 7y ago

human excrement You mean like yourself, you fucking piece of shit?