San Francisco becomes the first US city to BAN government use of facial recognition
- Legislation bans municipal but not personal, business or federal government use
- Departments will need to get board approval to continue using or acquiring tech
- A second vote will be held next week, when it could become an official law
San Francisco supervisors approved a ban on police using facial recognition technology, making it the first city in the U.S. with such a restriction.
The ban is part of broader oversight legislation that orders San Francisco departments to spell out details of any surveillance currently in use and any surveillance they hope to use.
Departments will need to get board approval to continue using or acquiring technology.
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In this Oct. 31, 2018, file photo, demonstrators hold images of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos near their faces during a Halloween-themed protest at Amazon headquarters over the company's facial recognition system, 'Rekognition,' in Seattle
The vote was 8 to 1, with Supervisor Catherine Stefanie saying she could not vote for legislation that was well-intentioned, but could compromise public safety.
The legislation bans municipal use but not personal, business or federal government use of face ID technology.
San Francisco supervisors are considering surveillance oversight legislation that includes a ban on the use of facial recognition technology by police.
A second vote will be held next week, when it could officially become a law if it gets the board's approval.
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San Francisco is on track to become the first U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition by police and other city agencies as the technology creeps increasingly into daily life
The face ID ban would apply to city departments, but not to personal, business or federal use.
Privacy advocates have squared off with public safety proponents at several heated hearings in San Francisco, a city teeming with tech innovation and the home of Twitter, Airbnb and Uber.
Those who support the ban say facial recognition technology is not only flawed, but a serious threat to civil rights.
Opponents say the police need help catching criminals.
HOW DOES FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY WORK?
Facial recognition is increasingly used as way to access your money and your devices.
When it comes to policing, it could soon mean the difference between freedom and imprisonment.
Faces can be scanned at a distance, generating a code as unique as your fingerprints.
This is created by measuring the distance between various points, like the width of a person's nose, distance between the eyes and length of the jawline.
Facial recognition systems check more than 80 points of comparison, known as 'nodal points', combining them to build a person's faceprint.
These faceprints can then be used to search through a database, matching a suspect to known offenders.
Facial recognition is increasingly used as way to access your money and your devices. When it comes to policing, it could soon mean the difference between freedom and imprisonment (stock)
Facial scanning systems used on personal electronic devices function slightly differently, and vary from gadget to gadget.
The iPhone X, for example, uses Face ID via a 7MP front-facing camera on the handset which has multiple components.
One of these is a Dot Projector that projects more than 30,000 invisible dots onto your face to map its structure.
The dot map is then read by an infrared camera and the structure of your face is relayed to the A11 Bionic chip in the iPhone X, where it is turned into a mathematical model.
The A11 chip then compares your facial structure to the facial scan stored in the iPhone X during the setup process.
Security cameras use artificial intelligence powered systems that can scan for faces, re-orient, skew and stretch them, before converting them to black-and-white to make facial features easier for computer algorithms to recognise.
Error rates with facial recognition can be as low as 0.8 per cent. While this sounds low, in the real world that means eight in every 1,000 scans could falsely identify an innocent party..
One such case, reported in The Intercept, details how Steven Talley was falsely matched to security footage of a bank robber.
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