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AI Privacy Government United States

Maine Passes the Strongest State Facial Recognition Ban Yet (theverge.com) 46

Posted by BeauHD from the state-wide-laws dept.
The state of Maine now has the most stringent laws regulating government use of facial recognition in the country. The Verge reports: The new law prohibits government use of facial recognition except in specifically outlined situations, with the most broad exception being if police have probable cause that an unidentified person in an image committed a serious crime, or for proactive fraud prevention. Since Maine police will not have access to facial recognition, they will be able to ask the FBI and Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) to run these searches.

Crucially, the law plugs loopholes that police have used in the past to gain access to the technology, like informally asking other agencies or third parties to run backchannel searches for them. Logs of all facial recognition searches by the BMV must be created and are designated as public records. The only other state-wide facial recognition law was enacted by Washington in 2020, but many privacy advocates were dissatisfied with the specifics of the law. Maine's new law also gives citizens the ability to sue the state if they've been unlawfully targeted by facial recognition, which was notably absent from Washington's regulation. If facial recognition searches are performed illegally, they must be deleted and cannot be used as evidence. In response to this new law, the ACLU said: "Maine is showing the rest of the country what it looks like when we the people are in control of our civil rights and civil liberties, not tech companies that stand to profit from widespread government use of face surveillance technology."
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Maine Passes the Strongest State Facial Recognition Ban Yet More

Maine Passes the Strongest State Facial Recognition Ban Yet

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  • What difference does it make? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 30, 2021 @10:49PM (#61539296)
    Looks like we're all going to be wearing face diapers for the foreseeable future. What will a facial recognition system do, classify me as "John Pamper?"

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Shag ( 3737 )

      And by the time you take your mask off, you'll have 24 months of beard growth, which facial recognition will probably find every bit as enjoyable.

      (This is presuming you're in Maine.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      We already are from the virus! I am.

    • Duh, it said "Maine" -- wedding, graduation and "Grandma is still alive" parties are in full swing without social distancing, buffets, open bars . . . all the things that make it easier to count the people not infected after these events instead of those that were.

  • ... snoopy neighbors peering out of their curtains and calling the police when they see a suspicious person? How will they differentiate between this and a Ring camera equipped with recognition providing the homeowner a report and then they call it in as if they recognize the culprit?

    If I see someone I know robbing a bank, will I have to plead my 5th Amendment rights not to testify that I recognized them?

    • Don't get caught up in panning the bill because of a badly worded summary. The bill itself is named 'An Act To Increase Privacy and Security by Regulating the Use of Facial Surveillance Systems by Departments, Public Employees and Public Officials'.

      Someone visually recognizing an individual is not the same as using a facial surveillance system to match an unknown face to a biometric database.
      • Not the same thing? All faces are unknown to a person until their internal biometric database has a match for the face. So would it be ok to train large numbers of people to look for large numbers of other people. Or maybe just pay people to look for people that they might know? How is that different? Just because it would be more difficult to do since computers are not doing the heavy lifting makes it ok? This is a lot more complicated than your simple political dogma makes you think it is.

        • How is that different?

          Scale.

          There are a lot of things that it is OK for the State to do on a small scale to help solve or prevent crime, but not a large scale. Intercepting mail, listening in on telephone calls, evesdropping on conversations, tracking where people go, etc.

          In the past these have been naturally limited by cost - it takes a lot of money to have someone followed 24/7, or run around a telephone exchange tracing where a phone call came from, or watch a premises to see who comes and goes. It would have been prohibitiv

      • Don't get caught up in panning the bill because of a badly worded summary. The bill itself is named 'An Act To Increase Privacy and Security by Regulating the Use of Facial Surveillance Systems by Departments, Public Employees and Public Officials'.

        Of course, nothing in this law will prevent the use of facial recognition software by individuals or businesses. Human figure and vehicle recognition are already standard in sub-$200 cameras from China. In five years, facial recognition will also be built in.

        I

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      According to the summary, the headline is horribly written and Maine only banned itself from using facial recognition. You, Me, and MegaCorp are still allowed to pay attention to what we see.

  • Private companies can do what they will with facial recognition.
  • Anyone opposed to 24/7/360 surveillance must be a criminal. Therefore, Facefirst, the largest "centrally managed database" of Americans' biometrics, has extended "watchlisting as a service" to those who can afford it. If you want to "enroll" a difficult customer, no problem. They will be universally targeted by anyone with their convenient app, whether by face, wifi beacon, license plate, and more! Literally without legal recourse or oversight! Together, we can privately end due process.

  • The broad exemption of using FR to identify a person in an image that is suspected of a serious crime seems like it would be the most common usage. Are Maine PDs regularly going through the effort to use FR for other purposes? The new law would of course prevent them from identifying potential witnesses or collaborators to a crime using FR.

    I'm all for the legislation, I'm just trying to understand whether it's a response to existing excessive use of FR or if it is proactive to set clear boundaries as FR b

  • Maine's new law also gives citizens the ability to sue the state if they've been unlawfully targeted by facial recognition, which was notably absent from Washington's regulation.

    You don't need a law allowing you to sue them, a law would only be necessary to amend an existing law which prohibited it. So no, it's not "notably absent" it's simply unnecessary.

  • Police cannot use facial recognition EXCEPT...

    If there are exceptions, they must collect the data to make use of it when an exception comes up.

    "We'll just collect the FR data and train the software like we have been. We'll just set it aside for now. Don't worry about it, it's all legal!"

  • In response, the ACLU said "Maine is showing the rest of the country we are in control of our civil rights with the exception of free speech, not tech companies that stand to profit from widespread censorship of Wrongthink, which the ACLU applauds."

  • Looking at this purely from a logical perspective, if they are going to ban facial recognition, then they need to render everyone in the state blind.

    Laws which prohibit using a computer to do something that the human brain does are idiotic. What happens when technology is used to augment what the brain does? For example what will happen when a person who has a chip implanted in his brain to offset alzheimers recognizes people by sight? Are such procedures going to be illegal?

    The only difference be

  • I wonder what sort of interesting things will suddenly be called "proactive fraud prevention"...

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