Weak “Guardrails” on Police Face Recognition Use Make Things Worse

Police use of face recognition technology (FRT) poses a particularly massive risk to our civil liberties, particularly for Black men and women and other marginalized communities. That’s why EFF supports a ban on government FRT use. Half-measures aren’t up to the task.

However, even as half-measures go, California’s legislature is currently considering a particularly weak proposal in the form of A.B. 1814, authored by Asm. Phil Ting (San Francisco). It would introduce paltry limits that will do nothing to address the many problems that police use of face recognition raises. In fact, the bill’s language could make things worse in California.

This something? It’s worse than nothing—by a long shot.

For example, major police departments in California have pledged not to use Clearview AI, a company that’s been sued repeatedly for building its database from scraped social media posts, in light of public pressure. But A.B. 1814 expressly gives police departments the right to access “third-party databases,” including Clearview AI. This could give law enforcement agencies cover to use databases that they have previously distanced themselves from and will erode progress civil liberties advocates have already made. The bill also states police have access to any state database, even if the images were not collected for law enforcement purposes.

California should not give law enforcement the green light to mine databases, particularly those built for completely different reasons. This goes against what people are expecting when they give their information to one database, only to learn later that information has been informing police face surveillance.

Finally, A.B. 1814 fails to even meet the bar of restrictions other police departments have agreed to adopt. As we have previously written, the This article has been indexed from Deeplinks