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Berkeley City Council Unanimously Votes To Ban Face Recognition (eff.org) 48

Posted by BeauHD from the domino-effect dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Berkeley has become the third city in California and the fourth city in the United States to ban the use of face recognition technology by the government. After an outpouring of support from the community, the Berkeley City Council voted unanimously to adopt the ordinance introduced by Councilmember Kate Harrison earlier this year. Berkeley joins other Bay Area cities, including San Francisco and Oakland, which also banned government use of face recognition. In July 2019, Somerville, Massachusetts became the first city on the East Coast to ban the government's use of face recognition.

The passage of the ordinance also follows the signing of A.B. 1215, a California state law that places a three-year moratorium on police use of face recognition on body-worn cameras, beginning on January 1, 2020. As EFF's Associate Director of Community Organizing Nathan Sheard told the California Assembly, using face recognition technology "in connection with police body cameras would force Californians to decide between actively avoiding interaction and cooperation with law enforcement, or having their images collected, analyzed, and stored as perpetual candidates for suspicion."
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Berkeley City Council Unanimously Votes To Ban Face Recognition More

Berkeley City Council Unanimously Votes To Ban Face Recognition

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  • The law won't stop facial recognition tech (Score:3)

    by timholman ( 71886 ) on Thursday October 17, 2019 @08:09AM (#59318134)

    Of course, this law will do absolutely nothing to prevent the deployment of facial recognition in consumer security cameras, which is proceeding full speed ahead.

    I would personally love to have a camera that will remember the face of the guy who tried to break into my car last week, and will let me know the minute he comes down my street again. And I won't be the only one.

    • The forth amendment to the constitution of the USA

      The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated

      This limits the power of the government to search persons, which facial recognition is searching random people all the time, violating the amendment above. You personally are not bound by the forth amendment and can search all the random people you like as long as they don't object and you are not touching them. Google and Facebook can do the same.

      For that reason, facial recognition will proceed at full speed ahead. The government should not be allowed t

      • "The forth amendment to the constitution of the USA"

        I think you mean fourth

        I never really got into the Forth language, I remember it was popular among hobbyists more than 30 years ago, is it still around?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

        The 4th amendment is not the 1st. It says "the right of the people to be secure..." not "congress shall make no law..."

        It means that you too are bound by it, you can't do unreasonable search and seizures because it would violate the "right of the people to be secure" for the people you are searching. That amendment is reflected in law, like those outlawing trespassing and theft.

        Also equating face recognition in public places to a search is really stretching it. A search is when someone have you reveal somet

    • I would personally love to have a camera that will remember the face of the guy who tried to break into my car last week, and will let me know the minute he comes down my street again. And I won't be the only one.

      Ah, so is this so you can save money from not having a police force by just being vigilantes?

      • If the police can arbitrarily shoot people without repercussions, why can't we?

      • Ah, so is this so you can save money from not having a police force by just being vigilantes?

        This could be yet another business venture for Uber: The Gig Police!

        Uber link their dispatching system with the police 911 system. When a 911 call comes in, it pops up on the Uber Gig Cop app . . . one or multiple Gig Cops can choose to respond.

        The cops would love this extra firepower support.

        The 911 caller pays.

    • Nest Video doorbells can actually do this.

      https://support.google.com/goo... [google.com]

      Mine actually does recognize people I've identified. Now we just need one for the car.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Falos ( 2905315 )

      If having a government-sponsored log of everything ever said or done in my house, from collectors placed IN my house, helps me remember the face of the guy who stole my stereo, I would personally love it.

      If having government-only backdoor keys to encryption means my bike won't get stolen, I would personally love it.

      repeat ad nauseum on all the "think of the children terrorists drugs", or maybe the muh innovations - you sound like a propoganda shill

  • While I can see the benefits of facial recognition tech, at the same time it makes me uneasy with the rates of false positives they get. From what I've read, it also has difficulty identifying African Americans. They're using it in Detroit [nbcnews.com], but they have a multi-step verification process, so that should help. I also don't like the idea of the government being able to know where everyone is all the time, though they can already do that by and large with phone metadata.

    • You may not have noticed but people are not too fond of making sure they are not making false accusations or preventing missunderstanding. With words literally meaning something different than what is in the dictionary for about 1/2 of the country these days.

      You hear it all the time... everyone using the wrong word to describe things that does not match up with what the dictionary says. It's only natural for people be totally okay with innocent people being crushed in their pursuit of "security theater".

      P

    • While I can see the benefits of facial recognition tech, at the same time it makes me uneasy with the rates of false positives they get.

      What disturbs me is that they're getting better at NOT having false positives. Once they eliminate all the false positives, then they know where and when EVERYONE is doing ANYTHING.

  • Holy Shitty Headline Batman! (Score:4, Informative)

    by damn_registrars ( 1103043 ) <damn.registrars@gmail.com> on Thursday October 17, 2019 @08:40AM (#59318224) Homepage Journal
    The headline suggests that the council banned it city-wide, for all applications. The abstract clearly states it bans the government from using it. That is a huge difference there.

    We know that slashdot has been skewing to the right for a long time now, but this was an atrocious oversight to not clarify that. Plenty of people here are already worked up over all things California, this is just feeding that machine.

    • Get over the lame right/left bullshit. It's obsolete.

  • super shitty headline (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hey editors and submitters, would it really be all that hard to add "by the government" to the headline, considering it completely changes the meaning and significance? Banning a tech would be a huge deal! But they didn't ban a tech, did they? They just decided their own organization wouldn't use that tech. They didn't trample on anyone else's rights.
    • Or, the headline could just replace the word "ban" with "eschew."
    • I agree with you, but I have had to shorten topic headings more then once due to number of characters you are able to enter in the heading. To shorten the topic heading it sometimes makes it less descriptive.

      Again, I agree with you that the topic headings can leave something to be desired sometimes.
  • This is great news for California, or at least the rest of California, since now criminals will have an incentive to leave other cities and move to Berkeley and its sistern, and conduct more of their business there.

  • What about the private sector? Won't government just contract out the work and be able to say, look, private sector.

    Of course, just passing a law saying they won't doesn't really mean much. Did that silly constitution stop NSA from spying on us and continuing to do so?

    Yeah, that's what I thought.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • "After an outpouring of support from the community" - since most of the people who live there are Antifa thugs who wear masks when committing their violent crimes, it seems odd to me that they would care.

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