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TESTIMONY
Shane Farrell, Staff Attorney at the Legal Aid Society's Digital Forensics Unit, on Opposing the Use of Biometric Surveillance and Facial Recognition Technology
2:18:53
·
3 min
Farrell argues that biometric surveillance, especially facial recognition technology, erodes privacy rights and civil liberties of New Yorkers.
- It diminishes citizens' democratic values and right to move freely without tracking
- Facial recognition perpetuates racial biases, often failing to work on Black faces
- It allows private businesses to discriminate using biased and racist technology
- Unfettered use subjects all citizens to massive increase in surveillance
- It erodes reasonable expectation of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment
UNKNOWN
2:18:53
My name is Shane Farrell.
2:18:54
I'm a staff attorney at the legal aid society in our digital forensics unit.
2:18:59
My job is to fight for the civil liberties of our clients and by extension all New Yorkers in the face of exponentially increasing uses of digital surveillance.
2:19:09
The use of biometric surveillance and especially facial recognition in public places erodes any right to privacy.
2:19:16
We have an citizens, diminishes our civil rights, and reduces our democratic values.
2:19:22
It's especially important in his city as large as ours that we protect the rights of people to move freely without worry that every movement they make could be tracked.
2:19:31
Every person has a right to privacy and a top economy and whatever small amount of space they're able to call home.
2:19:38
Biometric surveillance, particularly facial recognition technology, is built on top of and perpetuates historical racial biases.
2:19:47
That is why so often it doesn't work on black faces.
2:19:51
And why almost every known cause of false arrest as a result of facial recognition has been of a black individual.
2:19:58
It's unconscionable to allow private businesses to discriminate against community members and customers using what we know to be bias and racist technology.
2:20:08
It's also quite frankly creepy to know that every business that you walk into or walk next to on the sidewalk.
2:20:15
Might be able to know who you are and track your movements just because you walked inside or outside the door.
2:20:22
Unfettered facial recognition use doesn't just harm the people it mess identifies, it also subjects every citizen to massively increase surveillance.
2:20:33
We must reckon with the significant harms the city has inflicted on its poorest members through its housing system.
2:20:41
They we have a published well known list of the city's worst landlords and regularly see stories of large private landlords who refuse to do repairs.
2:20:51
And try to push out long standing tenants to jack up the rent.
2:20:54
Yet, vacancy rates are in the low single digits, and a huge amount of our city's residents have very little leverage over their landlords if they wanna be able to continue to live here.
2:21:05
A huge swath of our city has little autonomy or control over their own private residences.
2:21:12
We should ban further eroding their rights by subjecting them to any type of biometric surveillance to get into their own homes.
2:21:20
There is a concept in American law, the reasonable expectation of privacy.
2:21:25
It's currently the core of our democratic and civil rights under the forth amendment.
2:21:30
The more that biometric surveillance is allowed to permeate every space that our citizens exist in, the less society can rely on any expectation of privacy being reasonable.
2:21:41
When there is no longer any place that a person can expect to go, not their apartment, the grocery store, the pharmacy, not a basketball game, without their face being captured, indefinitely stored in a database, and constantly checked against suspicions of have having done something wrong, then we've hollowed out any shred of hope that a person can expect.
2:22:04
Reasonably, privacy, or democratic values anywhere.
2:22:08
I don't wanna live in that world.
2:22:10
I don't want my clients to live in that world.
2:22:12
I don't want my community to live in that world, and I hope you don't wanna live in that world.
2:22:17
Thank you.