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Government Privacy Watchdog Under Pressure To Recommend Facial Recognition Ban

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent agency, is coming under increasing pressure to recommend the federal government stop using facial recognition. Forty groups, led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, sent a letter Monday to the agency calling for the suspension of facial recognition systems "pending further review." "The rapid and unregulated deployment of facial recognition poses a direct threat to 'the precious liberties that are vital to our way of life,'" the advocacy groups wrote.

The PCLOB "has a unique responsibility, set out in statute, to assess technologies and polices that impact the privacy of Americans after 9-11 and to make recommendations to the President and executive branch," they wrote. The agency, created in 2004, advises the administration on privacy issues. The letter cited a recent New York Times report about Clearview AI, a company which claims to have a database of more than 3 billion photos and is reportedly collaborating with hundreds of police departments. It also mentioned a study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the Commerce Department, which found that the majority of facial recognition systems have "demographic differentials" that can worsen their accuracy based on a person's age, gender or race.


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