Articles repérés par Hervé Le Crosnier

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  • Portland’s facial recognition ban could be the strictest yet
    https://www.fastcompany.com/90436355/portlands-proposed-facial-recognition-ban-could-be-the-strictest-yet

    As the federal government plods along on developing privacy laws, some cities are taking matters into their own hands—with facial recognition technology at the top of the list. Now, Portland, Oregon, has plans to ban the use of facial recognition for both the government and private businesses in the city, a move that could make Portland’s ban the most restrictive in the United States.

    The proposed ban comes after cities including San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley in California, and Somerville in Massachusetts, have already banned the use of facial recognition by their city government agencies, including police departments. But Portland’s ban goes a step further by expanding to private businesses—if it makes it into law and takes effect in spring 2020, as planned.

    It could be a preview of what to expect across the country. “I think we’re going to start to see more and more [private sector bans],” says ACLU of Northern California attorney Matt Cagle, who helped draft the San Francisco legislation that later served as the model for Oakland and Berkeley. “People are really concerned about facial recognition use and the tracking of their innate features by governments and private corporations.”

    Hardesty, who’s spearheading the ban effort, also links private and government use of face recognition, such the way that hundreds of police departments are using video captured by Amazon’s Ring smart doorbell cameras. “I am very worried about the companies collecting data and storing it and then making sweetheart deals with law enforcement so that they get access to that data,” she told a September Portland city council work session about the proposed ban.

    Cities have enacted bans to prevent this by prohibiting city agencies not only from collecting facial-recognition data on their own, but also from acquiring third-party data. “If you’re a city department, you can’t yourself use facial recognition, but also you can’t go outsourcing that to a private party,” Cagle says.

    It’s not just theoretical. For instance, retailers have been testing and deploying facial recognition tech to check customers in their stores against images of known shoplifters. Facial recognition software provider FaceFirst told BuzzFeed News that thousands of stores are using its technology for this purpose. Live entertainment companies AEG Presents and Live Nation considered using face recognition to identify ticket owners and facilitate their access to services or parts of venues. Both companies halted their plans in light of protest by musicians, reports The LA Times.❞

    After Buolamwini shared results of her study with the big tech companies, they released updated models with much better performance. In a follow-up study, error rates for dark-skinned females dropped to about 17% for IBM’s algorithm and just 1.5% for Microsoft’s. But they were still a far cry from the accuracy for light-skinned men.

    Hardesty is unswayed by arguments that the technology can be improved enough. “Rather than going back to fix something we already know is flawed to begin with, we should stop it from taking root in the first place,” she says.

    “The capturing and encoding of our biometric data is going to probably be the new frontier in creating value for companies in terms of AI,” says Mutale Nkonde, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Look no further than Facebook, which is caught up in a lawsuit that could set the stage for how face-rec bans are enforced across the country.

    #surveillance #reconnaissanc_faciale #Portland