Portland, Maine passes referendum banning facial surveillance

Seems people are disregarding this vote based on hypothetical loopholes. Instead, i am focused on the awareness this bill represents.<p>Facial Recognition and Right to Repair improvements both ended up on state ballots and came away with citizen&#x2F;consumer wins (as opposed to gov&#x2F;corporate).<p>HN comments are usually quick to point out that &quot;normal people&quot; don&#x27;t have a clue about these issues. I tend to agree. I for one am happy to have such objective data points that the public is sensing some urgency here.

Thanks to the practice of Parallel Construction and using Third Party vendors, I&#x27;m sure there would be a way around this.<p>Hypothetically, the Portland PD sends all the details of the crime, including images, to a Third Party. Third Party, through use of proprietary black-box algorithms, returns a list of likely suspects. Portland PD investigates the suspects, and constructs the parallel case, without the need for the Third Party&#x27;s report to ever enter the court room. Not that I think Portland, Maine is an epicenter of authoritarianism.<p>Is it a good thing to have idealistic laws? Or is it damaging to have a false sense of security?

Good. I&#x27;m eternally creeped out by how many cameras are now in residential neighborhoods in urban and suburban areas.<p>In the city, there&#x27;s a dozen cameras on every corner. This was a problem a decade ago, but once you left the densely populated areas for the suburbs and rural areas, cameras were few and far between.<p>Now in the suburbs, there&#x27;s cameras at the intersections and in parks, and everyone is wiring up their homes with neighborhood surveillance cameras that let law enforcement know if the cameras capture any potential evidence that the government can subpeona or copy via a warrant without ever having to let the cameras&#x27; owners know.

I agree with the effort to find privacy solutions, but it seems like enforcement of surveillance bans like this will be an uphill battle as long as the physical video hardware remains present. 2020&#x27;s cutting-edge facial tracking systems will be 2022&#x27;s Intro to PyTorch tutorial, available to anyone with a $500 GPU. As long as video is being captured and stored, how do you realistically prevent it from being subject to analysis <i>some</i>where?

&gt; curb government and police use of facial recognition technology<p>So, it&#x27;s outsourced. A private entity does the spying and tips 911.

This law is a good example of why Gov officials don&#x27;t trust the electorate &amp; ceaselessly work to conceal their dealings from the public.<p>It&#x27;s because a well informed public tends to shift power back to itself.

Portland, Oregon already passed a similar law. Both of them seem a little ambiguous to me: they both clearly ban the city&#x27;s use, and ban the city from allowing corporate use in public places, but do they ban the private use of facial recognition by individuals on public property? Does failing to specifically ban this constitute authorization?<p>It&#x27;s been reported that protesters in Portland OR and other places have been using facial recognition to identify police who don&#x27;t have visible badges -- so I am wondering if this is banned.

We need to ban ALPR next.