QUESTION
What concerns do panelists raise about businesses feeding surveillance footage to law enforcement without customer consent?
2:38:48
·
4 min
The panelists express doubts about law enforcement's claims of not using live facial recognition technology on private business surveillance footage.
- They are concerned businesses could live-stream footage to NYPD without notifying customers
- This could allow NYPD to perform undisclosed facial recognition on the footage
- NYPD could then deploy officers based on inaccurate facial recognition matches, leading to unnecessary confrontations
- They oppose the shift from businesses monitoring their own cameras to directly feeding live streams to police
- This creates invasive surveillance without consent or privacy protections in place
Jennifer Gutiérrez
2:38:48
Mayor Adams announced regarding both 217 and for 20 5.
2:38:54
And a little bit with the postac mayor Adams announced that PD is expanding an initiative, allowing businesses to feed security camera footage to PD.
2:39:03
You referenced this as an effort to curb shoplifting.
2:39:06
We've heard at our post act hearing last year that PD does not use live facial recognition.
2:39:11
Do you have any concerns about this new initiative?
2:39:16
Need to
Nina Loshkajian
2:39:17
have we have many concerns.
2:39:19
Because, I mean, like Albert mentioned, the I mean, there's so many first of all, we we have to take them at their word that they don't use live facial recognition.
2:39:29
We don't know if that is actually true.
2:39:31
And the this kind of live streaming from for example, if your grocery store starts using facial recognition under the current law, they would be required to post that they are.
2:39:43
But if the new agreement, new state of the of play becomes that your grocery store just has a surveillance camera, and then that stream is being fed to the NYPD, and then that NYPD is performing facial recognition.
2:39:56
Does that mean that customers don't need to be notified under the current law?
2:39:59
There's all sorts of concerns that we have about this new dynamic that would come into play.
2:40:05
Also, that means that there's no opportunity for people on the ground.
2:40:09
You know, this could mean that NYPD just automatically deploys officers, you know, because of a mismatch that said, oh, there's a shop for an x store that will unnecessarily lead to a violent interaction.
2:40:23
Whereas, you know, we, obviously, we oppose this technology use in general.
2:40:26
But with stores just using surveillance cameras, they can be monitoring those.
2:40:30
And then they can go see what's actually going on or, you know, they have kind of a lot of business owners say they they know the repeat offenders who who they actually are like human recognition.
2:40:43
So there's just a whole new dynamic that will come into play if there's that kind of live streamed to the to the police.
Hally Thornton
2:40:52
Yeah.
UNKNOWN
2:40:53
I would also add that even if they aren't using facial recognition, They may be using sophisticated video analytics such as object recognition, which allows them to basically surveil, you know, have this thousands of video feeds live at one time and have algorithms that identify suspicious objects, quote unquote, that they then turn their attention to that.
2:41:25
And so the video analytics is basically doing the job of thousands of officers watching screen at one time, meaning that they can search through and find certain things even without it being a face in a way that is, again, very creepy, and that has not been explored as much as facial recognition.
Albert Fox Cahn
2:41:54
I mean, To me, this is the latest example of a mayor that prioritizes public relations over public safety.
2:42:00
He always wants to find the high-tech gimmick.
2:42:03
That supposedly is gonna keep us safe.
2:42:05
But how many cameras do we actually need?
2:42:08
Alright?
2:42:08
Here, we we see tens of thousands of cameras that are owned and operated by the NYPD tens of 1000 of cameras that they access through the domain awareness system on top of that.
2:42:18
We see this new pilot product.
2:42:20
So how many cameras are gonna supposedly keep us safe?
2:42:23
To me, it's really just this constant effort that whenever there's something about crime in the news, the mayor will say this expanded program will somehow work without ever providing any evidence that the past camera systems have lived up to the amount of estimate we've made in them.
2:42:44
And I will say looking at the disaster that Detroit has had and that several other cities have had with similar public private camera partnerships.
2:42:54
It's really alarming because in Detroit under their project green light, there were allegations that stores were being coerced to agree to this sort of partnership being sold, hey, you know, you're going to get faster 911 response if you sign up to this thing versus the other folks who don't.
2:43:14
And so, again, there's a lot of potential for abuse.
2:43:18
And a very questionable premise that this is helpful in the at all.
