This House would ban facial recognition in public spaces.

tech

San Francisco, Portland, and Boston have banned police use. China and the UK have expanded use. The technology improves faster than the policy debate around it.

Background

NIST's 2024 vendor test showed the top facial-recognition systems crossing 99% accuracy across demographics; up from a 10-100x error rate on darker-skinned faces in the 2018 benchmarks. The accuracy gap that fueled the original ban movement has narrowed. London's Metropolitan Police live-deployment, expanded in 2023, has produced 540 arrests against 3.4 million scans. The civil-liberties critique no longer rests on accuracy; it rests on what continuous identification of citizens in public means for what privacy is.

Government opens with

Continuous identification in public is a categorical change in what privacy means.

Opposition responds with

Bans push the practice to private actors with worse accountability than police.