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These crowdsourced maps will show exactly where surveillance cameras are watching

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advertisementadvertisementAmnesty International is producing a map of all the places in New York City where surveillance cameras are scanning residents’ faces.advertisementadvertisementThe project will enlist volunteers to use their smartphones to identify, photograph, and locate government-owned surveillance cameras capable of shooting video that could be matched against people’s faces in a database through AI-powered facial recognition.The map that will eventually result is meant to give New Yorkers the power of information against an invasive technology the usage of which and purpose is often not fully disclosed to the public. It’s also meant to put pressure on the New York City Council to write and pass a law restricting or banning it. Other U.S. cities, such as Boston, Portland, and San Francisco, have already passed such laws.Facial recognition technology can be developed by scraping millions of images from social media profiles and driver’s licenses without people’s consent, Amnesty says. Software from companies like Clearview AI can then use computer vision algorithms to match those images against facial images captured by closed-circuit television (CCTV) or other video surveillance cameras and stored in a database.advertisementadvertisementStarting in May, volunteers will be able to use a software tool to identify all the facial recognition cameras within their view—like at an intersection where numerous cameras can often be found. The tool, which runs on a phone’s browser, lets users place a square around any cameras they see. The software integrates Google Street View and Google Earth to help volunteers label and attach geolocation data to the cameras they spot.The map is part of a larger campaign called “Ban the Scan” that’s meant to educate people around the world on the civil rights dangers of facial recognition. Research has shown that facial recognition systems aren’t as accurate when it comes to analyzing dark-skinned faces, putting Black people at risk of being misidentified. Even when accurate, the technology exacerbates systemic racism because it is disproportionately used to identify people of color, who are already subject to discrimination by law enforcement officials. The campaign is sponsored by Amnesty in partnership with a number of other tech advocacy, privacy, and civil liberties groups.In the initial phase of the project, which was announced last Thursday, Amnesty and its partners launched a that New Yorkers can use to generate public comments on the New York Police Department’s (NYPD’s) use of facial recognition. Later in the campaign, the website will let citizens generate Freedom of Information Act requests to discover where and how facial recognition systems are being used in their neighborhood or borough.advertisementAmnesty International says it hopes to launch a crowdsourced mapping project similar to the one in New York for New Delhi this spring, for the West Bank sometime this summer or early fall, and in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in the fourth quarter of the year.In 2011 the advertisementThe NYPD can use thumbnail stills from that video and run them through software like DataWorks Plus or , which compares them to other image databases, says In the case of Clearview AI at least, images from the surveillance database can also be compared against images scraped from social networks.The NYPD’s own statistics show that it ran almost 10,000 facial recognition searches against its DAS database in 2019, leading to 2,510 “possible matches.” This may have been significantly understated. BuzzFeed News&nbsp; in February 2020 that the department had run more than 11,000 searches using the controversial Clearview AI technology. Clearview AI says it works with 600 law enforcement agencies in the U.S., and DataWorks Plus’s is widely used by law enforcement agencies across the country.In general, Mahmoudi says, the content and variety of the images used for facial recognition depends on what agency owns and operates the database. A federal agency may collect facial recognition thumbnails to compare against a database of drivers’ licenses for immigration enforcement. A database used by local law enforcement may use both license plate images and facial images from social media in an investigation of criminal suspects.advertisementBut in all of these cases, the public doesn’t know that their faces are being scanned for facial recognition when they pass through an intersection in New York.“The purpose of doing this mapping is to make it clear to New Yorkers, and anyone who lives in a city with a police department that uses this technology, that there’s no way out,” says Michael Kleinman, director of Amnesty International’s Silicon Valley Initiative. If asked if people would be comfortable knowing that the police had a file on every citizen, “most of us would answer, ‘Of course not, that sounds like something that happened in East Germany’,” Kleinman says.The NYPD used its facial recognition system last summer to track down Derrick Ingram, a Black Lives Matter activist accused of shouting into a police officer’s ear with a bullhorn during a demonstration. Dozens of police officers, some in riot gear, in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York on August 7. The event caused a public outcry because it was another example of facial recognition being used indiscriminately against people of color. At least have been wrongly jailed because of faulty facial recognition tech, and more cases may have gone unreported.advertisementThe Black Lives Matter movement of the past year was a reaction to systematic bias in the way police interact with Black people, a problem facial recognition can only exacerbate.”Compounding the problem further is the fact that the computer vision AI used in facial recognition systems has shown itself to be when identifying the faces of people of color. This leads to higher rates of mismatch among Black or brown faces than among white faces.advertisementAfter the Derrick Ingram incident, Mayor de Blasio’s office said it would “reassess” the police department’s guidelines for using facial recognition. But it’s questionable whether the NYPD can credibly police itself on the judicious use of facial recognition. That’s one reason Amnesty and other civil rights groups believe the city council needs to pass a law restricting use of the technology.If the New York City Council doesn’t move quickly, the federal government may move first, providing a set of regulations on how law enforcement at all levels can use the technology. A federal bill might also supersede the patchwork of local and state bills that are growing in number now.Such a bill was introduced in the Senate last Juneby Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), but failed to advance in 2020. The bill, as written, would prevent federal funds from being spent on facial recognition technology or any other biometric surveillance system. Federal agencies, then, could not contract for surveillance systems for their own use, nor could Congress or federal agencies grant money to cities and states for such systems.advertisementBut it’s a new year, with a new president and a new congress. Markey and Merkley’s bill, or some version of it, could yet see the light of day.“Democrats control the House and Senate and they campaigned on a message of racial justice,” says Evan Greer, who leads the progressive tech advocacy group Fight for the Future.“They have absolutely no excuse not to pass the common sense moratorium legislation that stops the ongoing use of this racist, discriminatory technology so that we can have a real debate about what role, if any, it can play in a just society,” she says.advertisementadvertisementadvertisementadvertisementadvertisement

advertisementadvertisementAmnesty International is producing a map of all the places in New York City where surveillance cameras are scanning residents’ faces.advertisementadvertisementThe project will enlist volunteers to use their smartphones to identify, photograph, and locate government-owned surveillance cameras capable of shooting video that could be matched against people’s faces in a database through AI-powered facial recognition.The map that will eventually result is meant to give New Yorkers the power of information against an invasive technology the usage of which and purpose is...

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Fast Company senior writer Mark Sullivan covers emerging technology, politics, artificial intelligence, large tech companies, and misinformation. An award-winning San Francisco-based journalist, Sullivan's work has appeared in Wired, Al Jazeera, CNN, ABC News, CNET, and many others.

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Mark Sullivan

Fast Company is a monthly American business magazine published in print and online that focuses on technology, business, and design. It publishes eight print issues per year. Fast Company was launched in November 1995 by Alan Webber and Bill Taylor, two former Harvard Business Review editors, and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman.

These crowdsourced maps will show exactly where surveillance cameras are watching

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