California will ban police use of facial recognition technology for 3 years

October 11th

(Ken Kistler/publicdomainpictures.net)

California will initiate a 3-year ban on the use of facial recognition technology in police body cams beginning January 1, 2020.

AB1215, written by Democratic assemblymember Phil Ting, will automatically repeal on January 1, 2023. Ting had previously proposed a permanent ban on use of the technology.

Ting said the following in a statement on October 8, after Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law:

The public wanted their officers and deputies to use body cameras to provide accountability and transparency for the community. The addition of facial recognition technology essentially turns them into 24-hour surveillance tools, giving law enforcement the ability to track our every move. We cannot become a police state.

Ting's bill made the news earlier in 2019 when the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a rights group that supports the bill, showed that Amazon's facial recognition software misidentified 1-in-5 California lawmakers, matching them to mugshots stored in police databases.

"It’s not ready for prime time, as it falsely matches innocent people with mugshots, including me," Ting wrote on Twitter.

Sections

Surveillance and Privacy

August 16th

AI-enabled technologies produce and rely on vast troves of personal data, most of which is unregulated and vulnerable to theft and misuse.

These technologies include:

Facial recognition: It helps users unlock their smartphones. It also helps police in China track criminal suspects and monitor members of the Uyghur ethnic minority.
Personalization: It helps consumers make necessary purchases and discover entertainment, but also encourages developers to collect personal data from increasingly far-flung sources.
Voice assistants: They help users answer questions, create calendar events, and set alarms. They also record audio accidentally, and until recently relied on human reviewers to listen to private audio to improve their responses.
Smart home products: Similar to voice assistants, these products allow users to remotely operate appliances, set temperatures and access security footage. They also collect a vast amount of private information about the home life of their users.

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