Unlike the ordinances in San Francisco and Oakland, the New York City bill requires only that the police disclose basic information about the technology that is being deployed. And now other cities are poised to ban facial recognition outright, while New Yorkers are not guaranteed even a measure of transparency into how they are being policed. San Francisco’s ordinance is not perfect — although it binds local government entities, it does nothing to protect people from facial recognition deployed by private entities. It wouldn’t deal, for example, with cases like the landlord in New York City who wanted to install facial recognition systems in its rent-stabilized buildings. Caution and public scrutiny are merited — and all the more so in the case of facial recognition.

Source: New York Times May 18, 2019 18:32 UTC