On Tuesday, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted to approve a ban on the usage of facial recognition tech by metropolis businesses, together with the police division. The Stop Secret Surveillance Ordinance, launched by San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin, is the primary ban of its variety for a serious American metropolis and the seventh main surveillance oversight effort for a municipality in California.
“I want to be clear — this is not an anti-technology policy,” Peskin stated throughout Tuesday’s board assembly. Peskin deemphasized the ban facet of the ordinance, as a substitute framing it as an outgrowth of the sweeping information privateness reforms signed into legislation by California Governor Jerry Brown final 12 months and an extension of prior efforts in different counties across the state. In 2016, Santa Clara county handed its personal predecessor to San Francisco’s surveillance oversight coverage, however that ordinance didn’t embody a ban.
Peskin clarified that the ordinance is an accountability measure “to ensure the safe and responsible use” of surveillance tech and to permit the general public to be concerned in choices like how lengthy information is saved and who can see it.
The ordinance handed by a vote of eight to 1, with San Francisco District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani dissenting. Nonetheless, Stefani referred to as the ordinance “a very well intentioned piece of legislation” and lauded the board’s means to deal with respectful disagreement. Last week, the board’s Rules Committee elected to maneuver ahead with a vote on the proposal.
Importantly, the ordinance additionally features a provision that may require metropolis departments to hunt particular approval earlier than buying any new surveillance tools. The ban wouldn’t impression facial recognition tech deployed by personal corporations, although it will have an effect on any corporations promoting tech to town authorities.
While metropolis businesses might want to search approval to purchase new surveillance units, they are going to be allowed to proceed utilizing what they have already got, together with police physique cameras and license plate readers. Supervisors expressed hope that the ordinance would result in a full accounting of such tools.
Among the numerous divisive points of facial recognition is the expertise’s disproportionate impression on already heavily-policed communities of shade. Recent analysis means that non-white people will not be acknowledged as precisely as their white friends, a discrepancy that bakes racial profiling proper into the tech itself.
The break up over the ban is energizing each anti-surveillance teams and proponents of excessive tech policing. The ban’s supporters embody the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and native teams like Oakland Privacy.
“If unleashed, face surveillance would suppress civic engagement, compound discriminatory policing, and fundamentally change how we exist in public spaces,” the ACLU of Northern California’s Matt Cagle and Brian Hofer, Chair of Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission, wrote in an op-ed arguing in favor the ordinance final week.
Other cities and states are wanting into bans on facial recognition tech, although San Francisco’s personal efforts are probably the most mature so far. For instance, a invoice in Washington state would require facial recognition software program to open itself to 3rd get together testing. In that case, main tech corporations are weighing the associated fee to their future enterprise in opposition to public sentiment that facial recognition and different surveillance methods are an invasive means for tech corporations to leverage their energy.
Across the bridge from San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley are each mulling their very own units of regulation for facial recognition tech, generally known as the Surveillance and Community Safety Ordinance and Surveillance Technology Use and Community Safety Ordinance, respectively. The East Bay won’t be far behind San Francisco’s personal vote.
