On November 2nd, Facebook (now under the umbrella of the newly renamed Meta), announced it would shut down its facial recognition system, citing “growing societal concerns” about privacy rights. This is Facebook, a business that harvests your personal data and tracks nearly all your activity on the internet to make money. Facebook, the recipient of the FTC’s largest fine in history for violating users’ privacy rights, has decided facial recognition goes too far. This same technology is currently legal in St. Louis, with no oversight of any kind required. How has our city been slower to take action than even Facebook?
Facial recognition technology exacerbates racial disparities in the criminal justice system, wastes taxpayer money, and poses a fundamental threat to our most basic civil rights. For those reasons, Mayor Tishaura Jones must introduce a City Board Bill to ban the City government’s use of facial recognition.
Public surveillance is expensive, and we’re footing the bill. A recent audit of St. Louis City’s police surveillance technology revealed the City has spent over $4 million in taxpayer money on surveillance over the last three years, which is just under 1% of the annual police budget. That is equal to the total amount of police money Mayor Jones reallocated to affordable housing, homeless services, crime victim support, and civil rights litigators. That makes the potential for better uses of this funding clear, especially considering the benefits are, at best, elusive. The City was unable to present substantial evidence that its surveillance technologies are nondiscriminatory. Worse, the City failed to establish whether the technology even works, at all.
The evidence is conclusive: facial recognition does not work. Two studies by the ACLU showed Amazon’s “Rekognition” technology, used by Immgration and Customs Enforcement, incorrectly identified 28 members of Congress and 26 California state legislators as criminals. The false match rates are respectively a concerning 5.2% and an astonishing 21.6%. It is currently legal in St. Louis to use facial recognition technology without empirical validity testing, legislative or public oversight, a maximum percentage of false matches, or even a search warrant.
Further studies by MIT and the National Institute of Standards and Technology reveal a disturbing disparity in the technology’s error rates. The NIST study, which examined facial recognition algorithms from 99 companies, found widely varying accuracy rates. Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men. The MIT study found that when applied to women of color, three widely used facial recognition algorithms had astounding false match rates of 21%, 35%, and 35%. The image recognition AI used to design facial recognition systems has an even worse record, with AI systems having taught themselves racism and sexism. Image recognition algorithms have associated women with cooking, cleaning, and shopping. In a particularly ignominious incident, a Google algorithm mistakenly labeled photos of Black people “gorillas”. If we allow St. Louis to adopt the cruel regime of facial recognition technology, innocent Black and Brown men and women will live in fear of being falsely matched and wrongfully arrested every time they exit their homes.
While minority community members in overpoliced areas have the most to lose, facial recognition violates everyone’s rights. In a city known for its high levels of activist participation, ubiquitous, warrantless surveillance could have a chilling effect on freedom of assembly, in essence censoring political participation. This surveillance can reveal private “familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations,” as the Supreme Court noted in Carpenter v United States, as well as other sensitive educational, economic, and medical issues. If this surveillance is enacted without so much as oversight requiring a search warrant (recommended by the American Bar Association), it will be the most egregious violation of privacy rights in American history.
While it seems like everything is politically fraught these days, there is a widespread cross-party consensus against facial recognition. A Massachusetts poll indicated 91% of voters support regulating the technology and 79% support banning it entirely. The trend holds across party lines. (These numbers are similar to the decisive, bipartisan majority with negative views towards Facebook).
Mayor Tishaura Jones has the power to address this issue, and in doing so, strengthen her commitment to a more just St. Louis. By introducing legislation for a ban, the Mayor can use our city’s national relevance to set an example for municipalities around the country. In service of our rights and our taxpayers, the City of St. Louis must ban facial recognition technology.