The group says the technology is just too dangerous to civil liberties to allow government agencies to use it, even with regulation. It launched a website where people can contact their legislators and urge them to support a ban.
“Imagine if we could go back in time and prevent governments around the world from ever building nuclear or biological weapons. That’s the moment in history we’re in right now with facial recognition,” said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, in a statement. “This surveillance technology poses such a profound threat to the future of human society and basic liberty that its dangers far outweigh any potential benefits. We don’t need to regulate it, we need to ban it entirely.”
San Francisco and Somerville, Massachusetts, recently banned local agencies from using facial recognition, and other cities and states are considering restrictions. While law enforcement agencies sometimes say the technology is valuable for identifying and locating suspects, critics say it’s often proven racially biased. They also worry that it could effectively lead to a surveillance state, where people are automatically tracked as they travel from place to place.
The federal government continues to use facial recognition technology for a variety of purposes: The Washington Post recently reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement run facial recognition searches on images from state driver’s license databases, and the Transportation Security Administration and Customs and Border Protection have announced plans to deploy facial scan technology at airports.
sweetsmellingrosie on July 9th, 2019 at 14:36 UTC »
And encourage it in the private sector? Some people have fucked up loyalties.
Cyanopicacooki on July 9th, 2019 at 13:26 UTC »
Not going to happen, the genie is out of the bottle, and not only is it impossibly hard to put them back in the bottle, you're never sure afterwards if you actually managed it.
Like a lot of things, it's here, we'll have to get used to it.
We voluntarily - unless we try really hard - allow our selves to be identifiably tracked nearly all day every day, by carrying personal devices that record every where we go, we have devices in our houses that listen to what we say - we think that these are under our control, but the vast majority of people have no idea about how much of themselves that they are revealing, and how much more the tech companies can deduce from analysis the tonnes of data that they are amassing. Shops can identify by WiFi where you, personally, go in shops, where you spend most time, what you look at, and extrapolate from that - but do we shut down wifi when we go shopping?
Facial recognition is a worrying extension, but in practice makes little difference to our privacy as theoretically it will be bound by the same laws on data protection.
Threeknucklesdeeper on July 9th, 2019 at 12:00 UTC »
I'm just as worried about private companies using my face to market to me everywhere I go. Oh hey, we noticed to walked passed a jewelry store and looked into the window last week, heres a ton of ads.