Although a number of US cities have passed legislation which seeks to regulate or limit the use of increasingly controversial Facial Recognition Technology (FRT,) progressive Portland, Oregon has passed the toughest laws in the nation, outright banning its use by any city agency including police, and it's use in public-facing public accommodations. Public accommodations are any business that is open to the general public as a matter of routine business.
Boston, San Francisco, and Oakland are other cities also have passed ordinances governing FRT, but the laws are relatively weak and often merely direct city departments not to abuse the technology. Portland takes the position that the technology is inherently at odds with human freedom and equal treatment under the law.
Some argue that AI Facial Recognition street cameras are inherently unconstitutional, because this constitutes a 24/7 search. The US Constitution guarantees that searches many be performed only on probable cause and/or with a warrant. Evidence obtained by illegal search must be thrown out, even if it uncovers a crime. As in China, AI Facial Recognition can constantly match people on the street or in stores with their identities, and track and store their movements into a massive AI database.
AI-driven facial recognition technology is also increasingly used by police to attempt to identify culprits in crimes, by running faces against massive databases of anyone whose facial data has been by either governments or third party vendors.
Racist Algorithms
Facial recognition algorithms used in this technology have become highly controversial for their clear and consistent bias against people of color, who have repeatedly been wrongly identified by the computers as the perpetrators of a crime.
This month a man filed a lawsuit in a case in which he was wrongly arrested for the robbery of a Sunglass Hut in Houston in 2022, based on an FRT match. He was thrown in jail, gang raped, then released with all charges dismissed.
The man in the Houston case is Harvey Eugene Murphy Jr., who was arrested after FRT had made a match. Anytime someone posts his or her picture online, or submits to a "video selfie" of the kind states and the US government is asking for in order to "verify identity," the images are likely to wind up in a massive database of the kind Mr. Murphy was in. Many states are "partnering" with third party vendors such as ID.me.
In an explosive January 15, 2025 Washington Post article on the inherent dangers of using facial recognition in law enforcement, the Post writes:
"We've seen this before. Many times. Galtin and Vernau join a growing list of those known to have been wrongfully arrested around the United States based on police use of face recognition. They include Michael Oliver, Nijeer Parks, Randal Reid, Alonzo Sawyer, Robert Williams, and Porcha Woodruff. It is no coincidence that all six of these people, and now adding Christopher Galtin to that list, are Black."
In 2020 Boston passed a ban on the city's use of FRT, citing an MIT Media Lab study which showed that darker-skinned women are nearly 35% more likely to be misidentified by facial recognition technology than lighter-skinned white men. The ordinance was passed unanimously and authored by now-Boston-Mayor Michelle Wu.
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