San Diego Held Back Materials Sought by Congress on Facial Recognition
(Voice of San Diego, May 03, 2021)
In 2017, the Committee on Oversight and Reform, the primary investigative arm of the U.S. House of Representatives, set its sights on San Diego. The chair and ranking member wanted to learn more about how the city and the region had been pioneering a controversial form of technology capable of unmasking people’s identities. They’d read news articles suggesting that San Diego’s use of facial recognition was more advanced than other metros. The task of giving Congress what it wanted fell on Tiffany Vinson, an employee in the city’s Office of Homeland Security.
Pressure Grows On Banks To Abandon Facial Recognition Tech
(American Banker, May 03, 2021)
With recent calls for a ban on all uses of facial recognition systems — even uses that seem benign, such as to give customers a more convenient way to log in to mobile banking — banks' use of the technology might have to be rethought. Facial recognition tech tries to match an image of a person’s face captured through a phone, video camera or other device with images in a database. Several cities, including San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and Portland, Ore., have banned the use of the technology among police and government agencies. The most recent wave of objections to the technology stem from police arrests of partcipants in Black Lives Matter protests.
Police Should Not Be Banned From Using Facial Recognition Technology, Says UK Watchdog
(Financial Times, May 03, 2021)
Use of facial recognition by police should not be banned and instead left to the discretion of law enforcement rather than lawmakers, the UK’s new biometrics watchdog has said. Fraser Sampson, the newly appointed commissioner whose job it is to scrutinise how police and other authorities deploy biometrics and surveillance cameras on the public, told the Financial Times he believed “police will have no alternative but to use facial recognition along with any other technology that is reasonably available to them.”
Clearview AI Fights Consumer Push to Shut Down Face Recognition
(Bloomberg, May 03, 2021)
Clearview AI Inc. is battling what the company calls an “unprecedented” attempt by consumers in Illinois to convince a court to block its facial recognition technology. The proposed court order seeks to prevent Clearview from using people’s likenesses without permission, in a lawsuit that claims violation of the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act. Such an order could force Clearview to shut down nationwide, according to a Friday legal brief from the company’s lawyers in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Clearview has faced controversy for scraping more than 3 billion images from social media and other...
Defer Use Of Biometric Machines For PDS Ration: Depot Holders
(Tribune India, May 03, 2021)
The Himachal Pradesh State Depots’ Association has urged the state government to defer the use of biometric machines for the distribution of ration to card holders in all government fair price shops in the state immediately. Association’s state spokesperson Sudarshan Sharma said yesterday that these machines posed the risk of the spread of Covid among the ration card holders as well as the depot holders. He added that in view of the rise in Covid cases, the card holders w
City Council Passes Three Bills For Tenants Rights To Counsel And Privacy
(City Land, May 03, 2021)
On April 29, 2021, the City Council passed three bills advancing tenants rights. Two of the bills focus on expanding the right to counsel in housing court for tenants citywide and an outreach program to notify tenants of their rights. The third bill focuses on tenant data privacy. All three bills were sponsored by Council Member Mark Levine.
CPRA Series: The CPRA and Risk Assessments
(National Law Review, May 03, 2021)
The California Privacy Protection Act (CPRA) amended the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and has an operative date of January 1, 2023. The CPRA introduces new compliance obligations including a requirement that businesses conduct risk assessments. While many U.S. companies currently conduct risk assessments for compliance with state “reasonable safeguards” statutes (e.g., Florida, Texas, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York) or the HIPAA Security Rule, the CPRA risk assessment has a different focus. This risk assessment requirement is similar to the EU General Data Protection’s (GDPR) data protection impact assessment (DPIA).
