Oakland City Council President calls for City Of Oakland to ban facial recognition technology.
OAKLAND, CA – On Tuesday, June 25th, in the City Of Oakland Public Safety Committee Meeting beginning at 6:oo p.m. in the Council Chambers, the Committee will take up the issue of Face Recognition Technology. (Link to Agenda Item) A researcher with Microsoft described it as “toxic,” and called for it to “be banned for almost all practical purposes.” (Link to Article)
In reality, Facial Recognition systems rely on biased datasets with high levels of inaccuracy and lack standards around its use which has already lead to misidentification and manipulation of data. The invasive nature of this technology has also resulted in government abuses including its use to persecute Muslims in China and police accountability activists in Baltimore.
Council President Kaplan, an honors graduate of MIT, states: “I welcome emerging technologies that improve our lives and facilitate city governance, but when multiple studies show a technology is flawed, biased, and is having unprecedented, chilling effects to our freedom of speech and religion, we have to take stand. It is important to build trust and good relationships between community and police and to remedy racial bias, however this flawed technology could make those problems worse. The right to privacy and the right to equal protection are fundamental and we cannot surrender them.”
Data shows that this technology disproportionately misidentifies darker skinned women. In a 2018 report by the MIT Media Lab, the study concluded that face recognition systems worked best on white males and failed most often with the combination of female and dark-skin individuals with error rates of up to 34.7%. (Link to Study) In another test by the ACLU, Amazon’s Rekognition face surveillance software misidentified 28 members of Congress as criminals. (Link to Test) The misuse and lack of guidelines around the use of this technology has also landed some police departments in hot water.
In May 2019, Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology (CPT) issued a report, detailing how some law enforcement agencies fed facial recognition software flawed data and warned that there are “no rules when it comes to what images police can submit to face recognition algorithms to generate investigative leads.” (Link to Report)
On May 2nd at the Privacy Advisory Commission Chairperson Brian Hofer introduced the amendment that categorically prohibits the use of Facial Recognition technology. The amendment passed unanimously. (Link to Meeting Minutes – Item 6)