San Francisco bans facial recognition software

Lawmakers in San Francisco have voted to outlaw the use of facial recognition tools. It is a move which will have implications for police surveillance – and also for transit agencies. It was reported last year that Bay Area Rapid Transit (Bart) was considering the introduction of face recognition software on its cameras, for example – but Bart will not now be able to do so. The 8-to-1 vote by the Board of Supervisors means San Francisco is the first city in the US to take this step – and the decis
May 15, 2019 Read time: 2 mins

Lawmakers in San Francisco have voted to outlaw the use of facial recognition tools.

It is a move which will have implications for police surveillance – and also for transit agencies.

It was reported last year that Bay Area Rapid Transit (7357 Bart) was considering the introduction of face recognition software on its cameras, for example – but Bart will not now be able to do so.

The 8-to-1 vote by the Board of Supervisors means San Francisco is the first city in the US to take this step – and the decision may form a precedent which other cities feel bound to follow.

Some police forces are already using live facial recognition (LFR) tools for surveillance.

Civil liberties group Big Brother Watch said last year that the London Metropolitan Police’s use of LFR in public spaces was “98% inaccurate – it identified people correctly only 2% of the time”. Elsewhere in the UK, South Wales Police’s live facial recognition “was inaccurate 91% of the time and had resulted in the misidentification of 2,451 people”.

In an interim report earlier this year, the UK government’s Biometrics and Forensics Ethics Group concluded: “There are a number of questions about: the accuracy of LFR technology; its potential for biased outputs and biased decision-making on the part of system operators; and an ambiguity about the nature of current deployments.”

Detection, Monitoring & Machine Vision

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Debating road user charging systems
    January 26, 2012
    Are pre-launch trials of charging systems the way to improve public acceptance? Or is the real key a more robust political attitude? Here, leading system suppliers discuss the issue. The use of distance-based Road User Charging (RUC) is now well established, at least for heavy goods vehicles on strategic roads. However demand management for all vehicles, whether a distance-based charge or some form of cordon scheme, has yet to make significant progress. This is in spite of the logic and equity of RUC being
    Read More
  • Disability Rights California sues San Diego over dockless scooters
    January 30, 2019
    While the clutter from mis-used dockless scooter schemes is frustrating for many, it is physically unsafe for some, according to a legal action in the US. Disability Rights California slams an ‘unregulated onslaught’ in its class action lawsuit against the City of San Diego and three dockless scooter firms: Lime, Bird and Razor. “This action challenges the failure of the City of San Diego and private companies to maintain the accessibility of the city’s public sidewalks, kerb ramps, crosswalks and transit
    Read More
  • Jonathan Raper from TransportAPI is surfing the open data tidal wave
    August 13, 2015
    Jonathan Raper, managing director of the TransportAPI talks to Colin Sowman about the benefits open data can bring to the public transport sector. That the digital revolution would change the world, including transport, was never in doubt but the question has always been: how? Now, with the ‘Millennium Bug’ relegated to a question on quiz shows, the potential and challenges of digital technology are starting to take shape - and Jonathan Raper is in the vanguard. Raper is managing director of the open data t
    Read More
  • The benefits of combining enforcement and traffic management
    February 27, 2013
    Jason Barnes considers how combining enforcement equipment with other traffic management technologies might benefit our future – if only the will were really in place to do so. During the ITS World Congress in Vienna in October last year, Navtech Radar and Vysion­ics ITS announced a strategic partnership that would combine the expertise of Navtech in millimetre-wave wide-area surveillance technology with Vysionics’ machine vision-based automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) and average speed measurement
    Read More

Highlighted Content