US city passes restrictive ban on facial recognition use by police, others

A facial recognition demonstration during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The ordinance is a significant win for privacy advocates, who in recent years have orchestrated similar bans in a small, but growing list of US cities. — Star Tribune/TNS

MINNEAPOLIS: Citing concerns about its reliability and potential to harm communities of color, the Minneapolis City Council voted Friday to ban the use of facial recognition technology by police and other city agencies.

In doing so, the city joined places like Portland, Oregon; Boston and Alameda, California; that have already outlawed or limited use of the technology, which employs complex algorithms to automatically detect human faces from surveillance cameras, social media and other sources and match them to names. Research has found that the software sometimes has trouble correctly identifying Black and Latino people.