FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, July 9, 2019 Contact: Evan Greer, 978-852-6457, [email protected]
Digital rights group Fight for the Future, known for organizing many of the largest online protests in history, has launched BanFacialRecognition.com, becoming the first national organization to call for a complete Federal ban on government use of facial recognition surveillance.
The page features an eerie and dystopian face scanning animation, and allows Internet users to easily contact their local, state, and federal lawmakers. It reads: “Silicon Valley lobbyists are disingenuously calling for light “regulation” of facial recognition so they can continue to profit by rapidly spreading this surveillance dragnet. They’re trying to avoid the real debate: whether technology this dangerous should even exist. Industry and government friendly oversight will not fix the dangers inherent in law enforcement use of facial recognition: we need an all out ban.”
An infographic further down the page drives the argument home: “Facial recognition is unlike any other form of surveillance. It enables automated and ubiquitous monitoring of an entire population, and is nearly impossible to avoid. If we don’t stop it from spreading, it will become the hallmark of authoritarian states, used not to keep us safe, but to control and oppress us.”
“Imagine if we could go back in time and prevent governments around the world from ever building nuclear or biological weapons. That’s the moment in history we’re in right now with facial recognition,” said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future (pronouns: she/her), “This surveillance technology poses such a profound threat to the future of human society and basic liberty that its dangers far outweigh any potential benefits. We don’t need to regulate it, we need to ban it entirely.”
Momentum against facial recognition is growing. This weekend, we learned that ICE and the FBI use facial recognition on millions of Americans’ drivers license photos, getting access to our personal information with no consent. Both Democrat and Republican legislators were outraged—both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jim Jordan, polar opposites in Congress, agree that the use of facial recognition poses a huge threat to civil liberties.
Cities are involved too: San Francisco and Somerville, Massachusetts, have both banned facial recognition. Even Axon, which makes tasers and body cams for police officers, said it would not commercialize facial recognition because it cannot currently “ethically justify” its use.
We’re joining this outcry to call for a complete ban on facial recognition. It’s time the federal government take a stand now to prevent this technology from proliferating across the country.
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Some choice quotes from the WaPo article, bolding mine: “ The FBI’s facial-recognition search has access to local, state and federal databases containing more than 641 million face photos, a GAO director said last month. But the agency provides little information about when the searches are used, who is targeted and how often searches return false matches. “
…in fact the closest they get to admitting that is “ The FBI said its system is 86 percent accurate at finding the right person if a search is able to generate a list of 50 possible matches,according to the GAO. But the FBI has not tested its system’s accuracy under conditions that are closer to normal, such as when a facial search returns only a few possible matches.”
……86…….percent?? ONLY EIGHTY SIX?? Holy shit. That’s crazy low for something that can result in an ARREST or CRIMINAL CONVICTION, that’s not just me, right?? like?? that’s barely more than a 4 out of 5 chance?? Yeah it’s better than random 50/50 guess, by a considerable amount, but that’s still a a HUGE margin of error considering the stakes??
And this is them trying to convince people to actually let them use it!! To pry into personal lives and activities of people who didn’t consent to the search!! Yeah they claim they ~investigate past that~ but considering how unreliable even eyewitness testimony is at accurately and consistently IDing suspects, particularly those who’re black or brown, and considering how this is investigated by human beings who have,, cough, biases like anybody else would……….nnnngh??
Oh speaking of the extra risk to POC, that’s ALSO being made worse!
“ Civil rights advocates have said the inaccuracies of facial recognition pose a heightened danger of misidentification and false arrests. The software’s precision is highly dependent on a number of factors, including the lighting of a subject’s face and the quality of the image, and research has shown that the technology performs less accurately on people with darker skin.”
So let me get this straight: this tech, a tech that only works on 43 out of every fifty people WHEN you have at least 50 people in your possible range (so, false positives are at least 7 out of every such sample on average?? am I correct??), AT BEST………and is being used WITHOUT A WARRANT OR CONSENT to dig through personal data with the EXPLICIT intent to accuse someone of a crime……
….is ALSO much much more likely to falsely label a black person or dark-skinned Asian or Latinx person, than a white one, of being a Potential Criminal???
Ohhh man. Shades of “you fit a description, sir” all over again, huh? Human beings are already terrible at telling people of other races apart, you are really gonna use a tech that ALSO still has high key issues with that??
And if all this hasn’t unnerved you yet, please keep in mind that the worst part of this scandal is that this is pretty blatantly scraping at the Fourth Amendment: there were NO warrants issued for these facial recognition searches of driver’s license databases. They were run without establishing a Probable Cause as to why they’d be particularly needed, they didn’t have a warrant/paper trail to it, and NONE of the States this happened in, requires people to sign off consent to having their data strip-mined and searched by third parties let alone law enforcement like this!!
Like, jesus, NO?? At least require a fucking warrant???
Also sidebar considering how many people Happen To Look So Identical to say, Britney Spears, by sheer genetic/environmental coincidence…like, faces aren’t as Unique as DNA or fingerprints (which already aren’t ALWAYS 100% unique and have their own issues in terms of potential testing errors or matching limitations as it is), this is….this is horrifying?? The possibility of getting a false match even on white people but ESPECIALLY on POC, is SO FREAKING HIGH what the fuck??
Just. Yes, PLEASE talk to your State and Federal legislators about this!!! please, PLEASE get them to rein this in before it’s too late!! (or even more Too Late, as it were, since this is already going on apparently!!)
