Liberty vs. high tech dreams

San Francisco, a metropolis intimately connected with technological innovation, just became the first U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition technology by its police and city agencies.

Passed with widespread support from San Francisco’s board of city supervisors, and lauded by digital privacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, some expect the law could become a model for other cities and states.

There are a wealth of concerns about the efficacy of facial recognition technology, such as who has access to the information the software collects and how the data is being used or could be used by malefactors.

And while facial recognition technology is supposed to help authorities, particularly law enforcement, accurately identify people in a crowd, studies by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the FBI and elsewhere have found that the current technology often renders false positives when identifying people of color or women. Some fear this could exacerbate pre-existing inequalities in the criminal justice system.

But while the San Francisco ban is rooted in justified concern, it actually may be too severe — for now.

Facial recognition technology, flawed though it may be, has been used effectively in certain situations, such as missing persons investigations. And the technology continues to develop, as various companies seek to improve upon the accuracy of the software.

And so the issue for legislators and regulators becomes finding a balance between the justified fears of facial recognition technology giving false readings or being used to invade people’s privacy, and the same software’s potential for doing sincere public good.

Skeptics have also pointed out that technology cannot truly be “banned.” If it exists, people will find a way to use it. And as the law is currently written, San Francisco could simply contract organizations that use facial recognition technology to wriggle its way around the law.

So perhaps the best solution for now would be stricter regulation of facial recognition technology. For instance, the Commercial Facial Recognition Act, proposed in the U.S. Congress in March, does not aim to prohibit the technology, but to create a framework for protecting the privacy of the millions of consumers who are already being subjected to privacy intrusions.

People should know when their faces are being scanned; they should know how that data is being stored and for long; and they should know that strict regulations with some teeth are ensuring these protections are being implemented.

A ban on facial recognition technology could very well become necessary in the not-so-distant future, particularly if privacy advocates’ worst fears come to fruition.

Lawmakers must work to find the balance between the protection of civil liberties and technological innovation. But liberty should trump technology in the end.