A Microsoft Employee Literally Wrote Washington’s Facial Recognition Law

This article appeared on April 3, but I am just getting around to it. Dave Gershgorn reports:

Tuesday should have been a win for privacy advocates. Washington state signed SB 6280 into law, making it the first state in the country to pass a facial recognition bill, which outlines how the government can and cannot use the technology.

But a closer look reveals the bill’s flaws. The law does little to curtail government use of facial recognition, instead setting up basic transparency and accountability mechanisms for when the state does decide to deploy dystopian real-time surveillance.