San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors has voted 8 to 1 in favor of a bill banning the use of facial recognition. This makes SF the first major city to ban this technology, easing its residents’ surveillance fears.
Officials hope it paves the way for similar legislation throughout the country. Massachusetts has already seen a bill that would “put a moratorium on facial recognition and other remote biometric surveillance systems,” while Capitol Hill is considering banning commercial face recognition used for advertising.
Matt Cagle, an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, summed up the broad concerns of critics Tuesday: Facial recognition technology, he said, “provides government with unprecedented power to track people going about their daily lives. That’s incompatible with a healthy democracy.”