John,
Members of Congress just introduced a bill to ban facial recognition!1
Contact your legislators and tell them to pass the bill and ban facial recognition.
Today, Senators Markey and Merkley and Representatives Jayapal and Pressley introduced the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act of 2020 in the Senate and House that effectively bans law enforcement and government use of facial recognition.
This is really amazing, has been years in the making, and could not have come at a better time. Facial recognition is a uniquely dangerous form of surveillance that is already being used by law enforcement agencies across the country, and doing harm to communities right now. It automates discriminatory policing and exacerbates existing injustices in our deeply racist criminal justice system. Just this week news broke about Robert Williams, a Black man in Detroit who was wrongfully arrested in front of his wife and children and held for 30 hours after being falsely identified by facial recognition technology.2,3
Facial recognition is unreliable, biased, and a threat to basic rights and safety. The only way to keep it from hurting more people is by banning its use.
Please send a message to your members of Congress and ask them to protect our safety, our privacy, and our essential rights by supporting this legislation to ban facial recognition.
Together, and against facial recognition
Footnotes:
1. CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/25/tech/facial-recognition-legislation-markey/index.html
2. Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/24/i-was-wrongfully-arrested-because-facial-recognition-why-are-police-allowed-use-this-technology/
3. New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html
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