New Proposal Would Ban Government Facial Recognition Use In San Francisco (sfexaminer.com) 59
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The San Francisco Examiner: San Francisco could be the first city in the nation to ban city agencies from using facial recognition surveillance technology under proposed legislation announced Tuesday by Supervisor Aaron Peskin. The legislation, which will be introduced at Tuesday's Board of Supervisors meeting, echoes ordinances adopted by cities including Oakland and Berkeley, as well as by the transit agency BART, that require legislative approval before city agencies or law enforcement adopt new surveillance technologies or policies for the use of existing technologies. However, the new proposal takes things a step further with an outright ban on facial recognition technology.
The San Francisco proposal would not only ban facial recognition but would also require the Board of Supervisors to approve new surveillance technology in general. The board would have to find that the benefits of the technology outweigh the costs, that civil rights will be protected and that the technology will not disparately impact a community or group. Peskin portrayed the proposal to be introduced Tuesday as an extension of his "Privacy First Policy," approved by voters in November, which sets new limits and transparency requirements on the collection and use of personal data by companies doing business with The City.
The San Francisco proposal would not only ban facial recognition but would also require the Board of Supervisors to approve new surveillance technology in general. The board would have to find that the benefits of the technology outweigh the costs, that civil rights will be protected and that the technology will not disparately impact a community or group. Peskin portrayed the proposal to be introduced Tuesday as an extension of his "Privacy First Policy," approved by voters in November, which sets new limits and transparency requirements on the collection and use of personal data by companies doing business with The City.
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I thought they were protecting all the illegal aliens.
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They are restricting facial recognition, but they are not restricting the collection of photos and videos. So they will still have all the data, they will just refrain from running it through an algorithm.
Typos in article. (Score:1)
You misspelled fecal.
Re:Absolutely ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is why we say that terrorists have won, because the US citizens have had their rights removed or diminished (with only sporadic objection), all because we're scared of terrorists. Never mind that drunk drivers and cancer kill vastly more people. The flaming wreckage may as well have landed on the National Archives because the constitution was severely wounded.
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See: https://ourworldindata.org/alc... [ourworldindata.org]
Compared to the 19thC we drink a lot less and have a lot less alchoholism. The figures for the 19th C because it averages out alcohol consumption over the entire population but there was a higher percentage of tea totalers. (The late 19th C, when we start having reliable statistics, had a strong prohibitionist movement.
And, if you
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The cost is not in collection. CCTV and a network in place can do that and bulk data can end up in any part of the USA.
Sort it in a nice GUI with an index and sell it to anyone in anther state/to the federal gov.
The sorting for other states/federal "consumer" habits database software is the real math and legal trick.
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They're for quick release!
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Better to NOT have governments tracking everyone's movements
"Facial recognition" is not synonymous with "tracking everyone's movements". Nice try at conflating the two so you can beat the straw man into submission.
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You completely missed the point. It's the classic "if you have nothing to hide..." argument.
Surely only criminals need to worry about the police using mass facial recognition, after all if you are not a criminal what does it matter if a computer sees your face somewhere?
In practice, such tools are always abused and while someone with sufficient resources may eventually prove their innocence, others will be railroaded into a plea bargain or end up with a black mark against their name for life.
dialling for $$$ (Score:2)
Some how I suspect the politicians will help monetize the security feeds at Walmart/grocery and liquor stores, with the appropriate friends and contributions, while screwing the citizens over crimes and Invasion, home and international...
Why hold back police? (Score:1)
To enforce city and state laws.
Why should a criminal or illegal migrant get privacy in a state?
A criminal and illegal migrant should expect to be in a lot of federal and state/city gov/police shared database systems.
CCTV should get the faces of people doing crime.
Of the illegal migrant getting city/state services.
Facial recognition works quickly and well to detect people trying for extra city support, services.
To scan fo
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Is staying in the USA as an illegal migrant freedom?
Should shops, parts of a city have to pass on the costs of supporting illegal migrants and the costs of crime?
Crime has a cost that has to be passed onto consumers.
Prices go up to cover for loss to decades of crime. To bring in more products and hope they dont get stolen.
Insurance costs get pass on.
The cost of extra security.
Thats less workers getting great jobs.
Communities have to pay more.
City services get
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No change in that to support city and states who cant balance their spending and collected tax.
Should the federal gov give a lot more support every city and state?
With that new federal spending would come total federal control over spending.
Taking from the mil to spend on the states might just give more control to the federal gov at a city and state level.
So its back to city spending and how the state spends its own collected tax.
How much extra crime c
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Why should a criminal or illegal migrant get privacy in a state?
Because the constitution presumably grants these rights under the ninth amendment. Also the fourth amendment would seemingly require warrants.
This is the USA, we should not become a police state. It is better that some criminals remain uncaught than to restrict the rights of citizens or residents (all persons within the US borders have rights). That doesn't mean private businesses can't use CCTVs, but the police should not have a carte blanche on surveillance without significant oversight to prevent abuse
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Most of the CCTV law changes are from the city and state level.
Some US cities get CCTV gov/private/poilce partnerships.
Federal law does not stop the detection/collection of face, gait, voice prints, smart phone, movement, transport use in other parts of the USA.
The collection by CCTV of every driver and passenger face entering some US cities.
Some 1980's federal database privacy law protecting everyone would stop every US city and state from a
Proper Law (Score:2)
Ban all facial recognition in public places, only legally allowed within private spaces and to be only used by the company at that private space and not across others, shared or sold and to be deleted once the identity process has been completed.
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Governments will still use it themselves, which is the major historical kind of problem ripe for abuse.
If government has it, the people should, too. I am less concerned a company tracks me to see if I am walking by a store with Depends than I am some government panopticon is tracking opposition to those in power.
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Poke your eyes out to avoid temptation (Score:1)
That's a weird way to do things.
Just adding a paid middle-man? (Score:2)
It private industry can still do it, they'll collect whatever data the government needs and sell it to them, or perform things like access control using facial recognition. So this is just a revenue generating law for private industry, not unlike the laws requiring official dealers to sell cars and preventing the manufacturers from doing so.
Unless of course the law prevents the government to have access to absolutely anything that has facial recognition, then just add facial recognition to any system you wa
This could end illegal immigration (Score:2)
Face ID? (Score:2)
So would Face ID become illegal?
Or will they just ban "bad" use of facial recognition?
How about voice recognition? Shall we ban that too? Yeah, get rid of Siri and Google Assistant!