Why Massachusetts is ground-zero for the fight against facial recognition – By Jake Pitre (Daily Dot) / January 29, 2022
Eight cities in Massachusetts have banned facial recognition, making it a hot spot in the country.
Boston. Cambridge. Brookline. Worcester. Easthampston, Northampton, Springfield, Somerville.
Cities and counties across Massachusetts have introduced bans or strict regulations on facial recognition technologies in recent years, making the state a hot spot of action as cities around the country enact their own laws due to an absence of legislation at the federal level.
As the pandemic has increased the usage of the technology in a variety of ways over the past two years, scrutiny over who is using it and why has likewise ramped up. The use of the technology by police and government agencies has been particularly criticized. But the question remains: why is Massachusetts leading the charge in banning the technology?
Critical and public attention toward facial recognition technology has intensified in recent years. A major milestone was the revelations in 2019 about Clearview AI and its collection of billions of images scraped from around the internet, a corporate maneuver intended to put the company ahead of its competition, with ethical (and even legal) constraints not considered.
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