Amnesty International criticizes the NYPD’s use of facial recognition technology news

Records obtained by Amnesty International and the Technology Oversight Project after a five-year lawsuit against the New York City Police Department revealed disturbing surveillance abuses targeting protesters and communities of color, including the repeated use of rights-violating facial recognition technologies.

An analysis by Amnesty and the Technology Oversight Project, a New York-based privacy and civil rights group, of more than 2,700 documents to date highlighted that facial recognition technology had been used by the NYPD on several occasions, exposing city residents to “intrusive, flawed and deeply discriminatory” surveillance.

The documents showed that this technology was used to identify individuals based on unsolicited reports from the public, which deemed some individuals “suspicious” because they spoke a different language or wore clothing of a distinct cultural character.

These “expensive, error-prone, and biased technologies waste billions of dollars,” said Michelle Dahl, executive director of the Technology Oversight Project, and emphasized that NYPD surveillance puts our neighbors at risk of false arrest, deportation, or worse.

Dahl explained that “it is time for New Yorkers to see the dystopian ways in which the NYPD monitors us all,” and she considered that now is “an appropriate time for lawmakers to take action and hold the NYPD accountable, by banning facial recognition and imposing real civilian oversight.”

The two bodies noted that facial recognition technology violates the right to privacy by collecting mass data images without knowledge or consent, suffers from racial bias, disproportionately targets black and brown communities, and restricts peaceful protest and freedom of expression through its chilling effect.

For these reasons, hundreds of organizations consider this technology illegal, with both bodies having long called for a “ban” on the use, development, production and sale of facial recognition technology for the purposes of identification and mass surveillance by law enforcement and other government agencies.

In their analysis of the disclosures, the two teams found that NYPD surveillance continually puts marginalized communities at risk, and the city’s police records documented instances of profiling against its residents based on language, ethnicity, or other protected characteristics.

Preliminary results from disclosures that included more than 2,700 NYPD documents showed that by April 17, 2020, the NYPD had spent more than $5 million on facial recognition technology between 2019 and 2020, and was spending at least an additional $100,000 annually.