Boston city councilors unanimously voted to ban the use of facial recognition technology by municipal authorities on Wednesday.
Convening remotely, 13 city councilors approved the ordinance that had been proposed earlier this spring by Councilors Michelle Wu and Ricardo Arroyo. It prevents city officials from using any face surveillance system or information from such a system. It also prevents the city from entering into agreements with third parties to use those systems.
The ordinance makes Boston the sixth city in Massachusetts to enact such a ban and the second-largest city in the world behind San Francisco.
In her tweet and in multiple interviews, Wu has referred to facial recognition technology's now-notorious tendency toward racial discrimination. A federal study in December found that Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men, and Native Americans had the highest false-positive rate of all ethnicities.
Wu told BostInno in February that the ban is likely a first step in limiting the use of surveillance tech in the city. She and her colleagues have been discussing the regulation of surveillance technology more broadly, especially in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.
"This is talked about most frequently in the law enforcement context," she said. "But there are so many ways in which cities and governments are gathering information on people that we have to have a very comprehensive framework for overseeing surveillance technology across the board."
The ordinance was spearheaded by the ACLU of Massachusetts as part of its "Press Pause on Facial Recognition" campaign. The organization is also behind twin bills on Beacon Hill that would enact a statewide moratorium on the use of facial recognition as well as other forms of biometric surveillance.
Those bills remain in committee in both the House and the Senate.
