The Facial Recognition Backlash Is Here
By: Dave Gershgorn
Tags: General Intelligence, Police, Facial Recognition, Artificial Intelligence, Surveillance

The Facial Recognition Backlash Is Here

But will the current bans last?

Photo: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images

OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.

The facial recognition industry has been quietly working alongside law enforcement, military organizations, and private companies for years, leveraging 40-year old partnerships originally centered around fingerprint databases.

But in 2020, the industry faced an unexpected reckoning.

February brought an explosive New York Times report on Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that had scraped billions of images from social media to create an all-encompassing database, and quietly gave it to thousands of police departments and companies across the world.

A ubiquitous facial recognition database weaponizing public social media profiles to create tools for law enforcement and private security was a splash of cold water for those who hadn’t yet understood what the facial recognition industry had become. Now the technology has never been easier to implement by corporations and law enforcement, and the ramifications of the technology have never been more serious.

Across the United States, bans on police use of facial recognition had started in 2019 with San Francisco. But in 2020 they proliferated, thanks to activist pressure from organizations like the ACLU, Fight For The Future, and AI Now. Portland, Oregon, instituted one of the strictest facial recognition laws in the world, and by far the most restrictive in the country, which prohibits private businesses from using the technology on their own premises. This means businesses like Walmart wouldn’t be able to use facial recognition to track customers in their stores.

“This is really about making sure that we are prioritizing our most vulnerable community members and community members of color,” Portland City Council Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty said in Kate Kaye’s report earlier this year for OneZero.

Portland, Maine, also banned police use of the technology this year, alongside bans and temporary moratoriums in Madison, Wisconsin; Springfield, Massachusetts; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Jackson, Mississippi, and Boston. Even Los Angeles placed a limited facial recognition ban on its police department, which prevented it from using facial recognition that sources images from social media, like Clearview AI. The LAPD will still use countywide facial recognition software that references booking images, according to BuzzFeed News.

“This is really about making sure that we are prioritizing our most vulnerable community members and community members of color.”

While Massachusetts legislators passed a statewide ban on police use of the technology, Governor Charlie Baker has reportedly refused to sign the bill into law, claiming that facial recognition is a necessary tool for police. This comes after players of the Boston Celtics basketball team wrote an open letter to Baker, asking him to sign the bill.

“Baker’s rejection is deeply troubling because this technology supercharges racial profiling by police and has resulted in the wrongful arrests of innocent people,” the players wrote.

The players are referring to a case in Detroit, where Robert Julian-Borchak Williams was wrongfully arrested due to an error in the police’s facial recognition system.

The federal government has also taken notice of the rise of facial recognition, with renewed pressure from Congress to legislate the technology. Democrats introduced a bill that would ban federal agencies from using facial recognition, and withhold federal funds from municipalities unless they also enacted such bans. This bill came weeks before an updated report from the Government Accountability Office, which recommended facial recognition legislation to safeguard citizens’ privacy.

Even tech giants like IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft, which are some of the largest creators and proponents of the technology in the consumer space, have stopped selling the technology to police, and, in IBM’s case, canceled facial recognition development altogether.

Legal challenges filed in 2020 against Clearview AI and the use of facial recognition in schools are scheduled to be decided in 2021, according to a report from CNET’s Alfred Ng.

Clearview AI is facing lawsuits in Illinois, which has the country’s best protections against companies secretly collecting fingerprints, DNA, and facial images. These legal battles could set precedent for how facial recognition companies are allowed to collect data and act as a call to action for other states as well.

All of this movement to regulate and restrict the use of facial recognition flies in the face of the enormous corporate and governmental interest in being able to identify people in public and private spaces. Marketers have long pitched facial recognition and other identifying technologies as the ultimate tool for understanding customers. And police departments often sing the praises of being able to pick out the identity of a suspect from a photo or video.

That makes the activists’ progress in 2020 all the more impressive, and the stakes all the higher.

In 2021, Amazon’s self-imposed facial recognition moratorium is set to expire, opening up questions as to whether it will actually commit to stop its work with facial recognition or continue working with police, as it already has with its Ring smart doorbell. Microsoft and IBM have also sent letters to President-elect Biden, asking for national facial recognition laws.

Those laws could curb the use of the technology — or add cover for the use of facial recognition by law enforcement in ways we can hardly imagine.