“There are many different tools available to law enforcement. Facial recognition is one of those tools where it’s all about convenience,” said Dr. Nicole Napolitano, research director at the Center for Policing Equity. But it is not without dangers. Like PimEyes, tools like Clearview AI can make mistakes and incorrectly identify people, leading to wrongful arrests. “Police have become increasingly dependent on what the model tells them, and then biased by it,” Napolitano said.
“There is no constitutional agreement right to cover your face in public,” accused Meyers, police director of the Manhattan Institute.
In fact, the legal landscape surrounding how law enforcement can use surveillance technologies has been confusing, explained Beth Haroules, an attorney with the New York branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, largely because the law does not has kept pace with technology. development.
For Haroules, the potential for pervasive surveillance means that people never really have a reasonable expectation of privacy, an important historical legal standard. “(Surveillance) cameras are not just the eyes of a police officer,” he said. “They are being monitored, perhaps 24/7, in real time. “They are feeding images with artificial intelligence, with the help of algorithms that then detect you and match you with a series of faces and places you have been.”
However, that legal fog may finally be beginning to clear.
This summer, a federal appeals court judge declared that geofencing orders were violations of the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, although this ruling only applies in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Similarly, a New York judge ruled Warrantless phone searches at border crossings are unconstitutional. While the ruling only applies to part of New York, it covers JFK, one of the busiest airports in the country.
Phone manufacturers have also moved forward with technological solutions to subvert surveillance methods. Google announced changes to how it stores users’ location data, preventing it from meeting future geofencing guarantees.
Still, it can be difficult to determine when police use surveillance technology. Tushar Jois, a professor at the City College of New York who studies the intersection of privacy, technology and censorship, said police departments would “routinely throw out evidence in their cases rather than share data” about the use of technology. surveillance.
Beryl Lipton, a senior fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology-focused nonprofit dedicated to civil liberties, said many of the things law enforcement officials used to dream about are now becoming increasingly commonplace. ever more possible.
“I think there’s been a big shift in the way we need to think about what it means to have an expectation of privacy in a public space,” Lipton said.
Half a century ago, Lipton explained, it was possible to see someone following you down the street and listening to your conversation. Now, that type of surveillance is not so obvious.
“That’s something that we, as a country, really need to re-evaluate,” he added. “We don’t want to be in a position, whether as protesters or just regular people, trying to live a life where we’re essentially followed and listened to all the time.”