S.T.O.P. Condemns NYPD Facial Recognition Database For Children

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View this email in your browser For Immediate Release S.T.O.P. Condemns NYPD Facial Recognition Database for Children [NEW YORK, NY, 8/2/2019] -- Today, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), a New York-based privacy group, condemned the NYPD for maintaining a facial recognition database for children as young as 11.  The database, whose existence was recently revealed by the New York Times, raises concerns about children’s privacy, safety, and the risk of false arrest, especially for children of color.   SEE: She Was Arrested at 14. Then Her Photo Went to a Facial Recognition Database. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/nyregion/nypd-facial-recognition-children-teenagers.html “Our children should not be catalogued in a government facial recognition database,” said Albert Cahn, Executive Director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project at the Urban Justice Center. “Not only does the NYPD’s program violate children’s constitutional rights, it’s just bad science. Facial recognition is much less accurate for minors, especially children of color. This photographic dragnet puts countless New Yorkers at risk of false arrest. We call on the NYPD to end this program and to ban any future biometric surveillance of children and teens. We must not allow facial recognition to become a digital stop-and-frisk program. Even if this technology did work well for children and teenagers, and it doesn’t, it’d pose an unjustifiable privacy threat.”   The New York privacy group previously spoke out in support of a proposed New York State ban on facial recognition in schools. In that campaign, STOP officials noted that facial recognition technology is particularly dangerous for children and teens, since the system is much more likely to result in a false-positive, wrongly identifying an individual as a “match.” Facial recognition technology has also been found to be less accurate for female-presenting individuals and people of color.   SEE: Smells Like Teen Surveillance https://www.gothamgazette.com/opinion/8603-smells-like-teen-surveillance   NIST - Ongoing Face RecognitionVendor Test https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2019/04/04/frvt_report_2019_04_04.pdf The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project STOP is a non-profit advocacy organization and legal services provider hosted by the Urban Justice Center. STOP litigates and advocates for privacy, fighting excessive local and state-level surveillance. Our work highlights the discriminatory impact of surveillance on Muslim Americans, immigrants, and communities of color.   - END – CONTACT: STOP Executive Director Albert Fox Cahn.   Copyright © 2019 Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, All rights reserved.