Mahima Arya and Nina Loshkajian write:
In 2020, New York became a national civil rights leader, the first state in the country to ban facial recognition in schools. But more than two years later, state officials are examining whether to reverse course and give a passing grade to this failing technology.
Wasting money on biased and faulty tech will only make schools a harsher, more dangerous environment for students, particularly students of color, LGBTQ+ students, immigrant students, and students with disabilities. Preserving the statewide moratorium on biometric surveillance in schools will protect our kids from racially biased, ineffective, unsecure and dangerous tech.
Biometric surveillance depends on artificial intelligence, and human bias infects AI systems. Facial recognition software programmed to only recognize two genders will leave transgender and nonbinary individuals invisible. A security camera that learns who is “suspicious looking” using pictures of inmates will replicate the systemic racism that results in the mass incarceration of Black and brown men. Facial recognition systems may be up to 99 percent accurate on white men, but can be wrong more than one-in-three times for some women of color.
Read more at Times Union.
Mahima Arya is a computer science fellow at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), a human rights fellow at Humanity in Action, and a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University. Nina Loshkajian is a D.A.T.A. Law Fellow at S.T.O.P. and a graduate of New York University School of Law.