John,

It’s the beginning of the school year for children across the US, and in many places in-person classes are resuming. But there’s some bad news: facial recognition companies are selling their racist, dangerous tech to schools by claiming that it will help fight covid-19 outbreaks.¹

Sign our petition calling for a ban on biometric surveillance of children.

TAKE ACTION

Facial recognition companies are sneaking their creepy tech in as a “bonus feature” of many temperature scanners used to screen students for fevers as they enter the building. But the technology is biased against many marginalized groups of people, including women, young people, and people of color.

Facial recognition didn't go so well this summer for Lamya, a 14-year-old girl who was kicked out of a roller rink by a temperature scanner with "bonus" Facial Recognition features after being misidentified.²

This is a trojan horse situation, where schools think they're buying temperature scanners to keep students and teachers safe—but what they're getting is a product engineered for facial recognition mission creep. Just like at the roller rink, schools are falling prey to the "convenience" and "safety" of creating blacklists or alerts based on facial recognition surveillance, putting students at risk, especially students who aren’t both white and male.

No child should be cornered in a school hallway because they've been misidentified, or forced to verify who they say they are when they're just trying to learn. But that's exactly what's going to be happening with #FacialRecognition tech this fall.

More surveillance exacerbates the school-to-prison pipeline, which disproportionately impacts marginalized people, especially low income people and people of color. Surveillance does not mean safety. In fact, surveillance harms student success. Students at "high surveillance" schools are less likely to attend college.³

Yet despite the clear harms of treating kids like they're guilty until proven innocent, surveillance companies are going all-out to convince schools to spend COVID relief money on surveillance systems like Facial Recognition.⁴ A major study from the University of Michigan concluded that facial recognition should be banned from schools,⁵ and the NAACP has recently come out in support of a ban as well.⁶

Kids don't have a choice when it comes to how their bodies are mapped for profit. Now is the moment to contact your school board, and join the movement to end child surveillance.

Sign our petition to ban biometric data collection on kids now.

For children’s right to privacy,

Lia & the team at ❤️Fight

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1. Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/schools-adopt-face-recognition-name-fighting-covid/

2. New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/technology/facial-recognition-misidentify-jail.html

3. New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html

4. Freep: https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2020/07/10/facial-recognition-detroit-michael-oliver-robert-williams/5392166002/

5. Gizmodo: https://gizmodo.com/black-teen-kicked-out-of-roller-rink-because-its-face-r-1847306558

6. Ed Week: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/high-surveillance-schools-lead-to-more-suspensions-lower-achievement/2021/04

7. Vice: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbpz7/tech-companies-want-schools-to-use-covid-relief-money-on-surveillance-tools

8. University of Michigan: https://michigan.it.umich.edu/news/2020/08/11/study-finds-facial-recognition-technology-in-schools-presents-problems-recommends-ban/

9. Fast Company: https://www.fastcompany.com/90657769/schools-facial-recognition

 

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