California’s Facial Recognition Bill Is Not the Solution We Need

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California Assemblymember Phil Ting has introduced A.B. 1814, a bill that would supposedly regulate police use of facial recognition technology. The problem is that it would do little to actually change the status quo of how police use this invasive and problematic technology. Police use of facial recognition poses a massive risk to civil liberties, privacy, and even our physical health as the technology has been known to wrongfully sic armed police on innocent people–particularly Black men and women. That’s why this issue is too important to throw inadequate or half-measures like A.B. 1814 to try to fix it.

The bill dictates that police should examine facial recognition matches “with care” and that a match should not be the sole basis for the probable cause for an arrest or search warrant. And while we agree it is a big issue that police seem to repeatedly use the matches spit out by a computer as the only justification for arresting people, theoretically the limit this bill imposes is already the limit. Police departments and facial recognition companies alike both maintain that police cannot justify an arrest using only algorithmic matches–so what would this bill really change? It only gives the appearance of doing something to address face recognition technology’s harms, while inadvertently allowing the practice to continue.

Additionally, A.B. 1814 gives defendants no real recourse against police who violate its requirements. There is neither a suppression remedy nor a usable private cause of action. The bill lacks transparency requirements which would compel police departments to reveal if they used face recognition in the first place. This means if police di

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