OPINION:
Flinging open the windows and doors to embrace the sights, sounds and color of approaching summer is one of the most delicious rites of spring, and it’s easy not to be to be conscious of the unblinking eyes that are looking back at you. It’s time you were.
No longer the stuff of science fiction, advances in surveillance technology have made real the watchful gaze of Big Brother that George Orwell warned of in his novel “1984.” The effect of the surveillance on the right to privacy, as well as the accuracy of evolving facial-recognition technology, requires Congress to lay down strict rules on the electronic eyes that know everybody’s name.
Division runs deep about nearly everything in Washington, but fortunately not deep enough to thwart skepticism of the use of facial recognition technology. “It’s the sweet spot that brings conservatives and progressives together,” says Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a Republican. “There are virtually no controls on where this information goes,” says Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, a Democrat and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, which heard testimony last week from civil-liberties advocates who urged getting a tighter grip on cameras mounted in public places to feed images of passers-by to computers that match them with faces in the data base.
Mr. Cummings observes that private businesses are investing heavily in facial recognition to enhance security, and 18 states have agreed to share their drivers’ license databases, including photographs, with the FBI. “As a result, more than half of American adults are in facial recognition databases and they may not even know it,” he says.
Watching the passing parade and capturing vital data of everyone who passes risks running afoul of constitutional privacy protections. “The Supreme Court in Carpenter v. United States noted that for the government to ’secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement’ of someone across time and space violates our expectations of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment,” says Clare Garvie of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law School.
In recognition of privacy deficiencies governing in the evolution of [identification] technology, the city of San Francisco earlier this month banned the use of facial recognition by police. Oakland and Berkeley are expected to follow, and state legislators have written legislation to prohibit the inclusion of the technology in police body cameras. Several cities — Chicago and Detroit among them — have purchased real-time recognition programs, says Ms. Garvie, and the Secret Service is experimenting with a cameras capable of sweeping the streets around the White House.
Flaws in the technology threaten to introduce racial and sexual bias into data collection. Identification accuracy peaks at nearly 100 percent for white men, declines slightly for white women and falls further for black men, and as low as 65 percent for black women, according to Joy Buolamwini of the Algorithmic Justice League. “The threat of face surveillance puts civil liberties at risk, in particular endangering vulnerable populations,” she says.
There are good reasons to be wary of both government and the private sector in deploying technology that invades privacy. But it’s important not to mistake the shortcomings of evolving technology for intentional discrimination. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez insinuates that facial recognition software targets minorities because it’s designed mostly by white men.
Despite the design flaws of an imperfect technology, there should be no harsh crackdown on useful facial recognition technology. A survey earlier this year by Nextgov.com found that only 18 percent of respondents favor strict controls on facial recognition if it means compromising public safety, and 55 percent oppose such limitations.
Public support for law enforcement technology capable of identifying passers-by was evident last week at the annual stockholders meeting of the retail giant Amazon. A contingent of shareholders tried to suspend the selling of the company’s facial recognition service called Rekognition to government agencies unless the Amazon board is assured that the software does no harm to civil liberties. The motion to do that lost, badly.
Congress must impose a high legal bar for the use of facial recognition. There’s no shame in being camera-shy.
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