King County, WA bans facial recognition software

Because I don't want to live in an overbearing police state. I find it weird that you would pick the example of looting rather than some sort of very serious (and irreversible/uninsurable) crime like murder. You are surely aware that technological capabilities lead to feature creep, just as you are surely aware that police departments all over the country now operate military-grade armored cars to little apparent public benefit.

Edit: just to expand on this, here's a press conference from earlier today (sorry about the poor sound): https://twitter.com/DarwinBondGraha/status/14001715920642416...

Here, Oakland, California's Chief of Police admits that police claims about molotov cocktails and crowd demographics that were used to justify the deployment of tear gas and rubber bullets against protesters a year ago actually had no basis in fact. The Chief explained that he received information to that effect via the radio, and then went out and repeated it to the public (via the media) without making any effort to vet its accuracy. (For clarity, he has only been police chief since February; at the time last year, he was a acting as a spokesperson for the department). It's arguable that the decision to deploy tear gas escalated the protest into a full-fledged riot; even if you don't think so, it certainly misled the public about the behavior and composition of the protesters, inevitably impacting policy debates and so on.

I feel this is a good example of why the police cannot be trusted with facial recognition tools; false claims can be used to to designate large numbers of people as criminal suspects, and that suspect status can then be leveraged to intrude upon their rights. Were California's interim prohibition on facial recognition not in place, chances are that it would already have been deployed to identify large numbers of legitimate protesters on the basis of initial false allegations (ie, lies) made by individual police officers. 33 officers have since been disciplined and no doubt civil litigation will delve deeper into this, but at present the police officers who were disciplined do not have to be identified, despite the fact that they were quite happy to lie in order to violate the rights of that same public.

https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-police-chief-apologizes-is...

Shut...up. There is no such thing as antifa, and even if there were, being anti fascist IS the correct call.

> You can support some uses of facial recognition without wanting it to be used to say ticket people for jaywalking.

That's a huge assumption that many of us (opponents to widespread surveillance tech) just don't agree to. I don't think it's possible to hand government this kind of capability, then limit it to a specific set of uses. It always expands in scope, covering more and more use cases until the folks over at Vision Zero[0] make an impassioned plea, "Suppose you could prevent 10 pedestrian deaths a year by enforcing our jaywalking laws better? Why wouldn't you want facial recognition software to protect them?"

Or maybe the bias-free policing people[1] put forward their argument that removing human cops from jaywalking enforcement will increase Equity. It would be a decent proposition! And you end up with every minor thing being automatically caught and ticketed.

That would suck.

"Slippery slope" may be a fallacy in formal logic, but it's damn useful in resisting the march into a dystopian future. Nip this shit in the bud. Make it require some effort to enforce the law.

[0] http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs/...

[1] https://council.seattle.gov/2017/07/20/council-president-har...

Facial recognition isn't very accurate. Based on some of the research I've seen, it's borderline worthless under many circumstances.

I wouldn't want to use it in such a situation because of the likelihood that the person who committed a crime is going to go free while an innocent person might take the fall for it.

The CA ban includes the police using facial recognition services from private companies as well