The Case for an Outright Ban on Facial Recognition Technology
Some experts worry that facial recognition technology is a dangerous enough threat to our basic rights that it should be entirely banned from police and government use.
[Editor's Note: This essay is in response to our current Big Question, which we posed to experts with different perspectives: "Do you think the use of facial recognition technology by the police or government should be banned? If so, why? If not, what limits, if any, should be placed on its use?"]
In a surprise appearance at the tail end of Amazon's much-hyped annual product event last month, CEO Jeff Bezos casually told reporters that his company is writing its own facial recognition legislation.
The use of computer algorithms to analyze massive databases of footage and photographs could render human privacy extinct.
It seems that when you're the wealthiest human alive, there's nothing strange about your company––the largest in the world profiting from the spread of face surveillance technology––writing the rules that govern it.
But if lawmakers and advocates fall into Silicon Valley's trap of "regulating" facial recognition and other forms of invasive biometric surveillance, that's exactly what will happen.
Industry-friendly regulations won't fix the dangers inherent in widespread use of face scanning software, whether it's deployed by governments or for commercial purposes. The use of this technology in public places and for surveillance purposes should be banned outright, and its use by private companies and individuals should be severely restricted. As artificial intelligence expert Luke Stark wrote, it's dangerous enough that it should be outlawed for "almost all practical purposes."
Like biological or nuclear weapons, facial recognition poses such a profound threat to the future of humanity and our basic rights that any potential benefits are far outweighed by the inevitable harms.
We live in cities and towns with an exponentially growing number of always-on cameras, installed in everything from cars to children's toys to Amazon's police-friendly doorbells. The use of computer algorithms to analyze massive databases of footage and photographs could render human privacy extinct. It's a world where nearly everything we do, everywhere we go, everyone we associate with, and everything we buy — or look at and even think of buying — is recorded and can be tracked and analyzed at a mass scale for unimaginably awful purposes.
Biometric tracking enables the automated and pervasive monitoring of an entire population. There's ample evidence that this type of dragnet mass data collection and analysis is not useful for public safety, but it's perfect for oppression and social control.
Law enforcement defenders of facial recognition often state that the technology simply lets them do what they would be doing anyway: compare footage or photos against mug shots, drivers licenses, or other databases, but faster. And they're not wrong. But the speed and automation enabled by artificial intelligence-powered surveillance fundamentally changes the impact of that surveillance on our society. Being able to do something exponentially faster, and using significantly less human and financial resources, alters the nature of that thing. The Fourth Amendment becomes meaningless in a world where private companies record everything we do and provide governments with easy tools to request and analyze footage from a growing, privately owned, panopticon.
Tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon insist that facial recognition will be a lucrative boon for humanity, as long as there are proper safeguards in place. This disingenuous call for regulation is straight out of the same lobbying playbook that telecom companies have used to attack net neutrality and Silicon Valley has used to scuttle meaningful data privacy legislation. Companies are calling for regulation because they want their corporate lawyers and lobbyists to help write the rules of the road, to ensure those rules are friendly to their business models. They're trying to skip the debate about what role, if any, technology this uniquely dangerous should play in a free and open society. They want to rush ahead to the discussion about how we roll it out.
We need spaces that are free from government and societal intrusion in order to advance as a civilization.
Facial recognition is spreading very quickly. But backlash is growing too. Several cities have already banned government entities, including police and schools, from using biometric surveillance. Others have local ordinances in the works, and there's state legislation brewing in Michigan, Massachusetts, Utah, and California. Meanwhile, there is growing bipartisan agreement in U.S. Congress to rein in government use of facial recognition. We've also seen significant backlash to facial recognition growing in the U.K., within the European Parliament, and in Sweden, which recently banned its use in schools following a fine under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
At least two frontrunners in the 2020 presidential campaign have backed a ban on law enforcement use of facial recognition. Many of the largest music festivals in the world responded to Fight for the Future's campaign and committed to not use facial recognition technology on music fans.
There has been widespread reporting on the fact that existing facial recognition algorithms exhibit systemic racial and gender bias, and are more likely to misidentify people with darker skin, or who are not perceived by a computer to be a white man. Critics are right to highlight this algorithmic bias. Facial recognition is being used by law enforcement in cities like Detroit right now, and the racial bias baked into that software is doing harm. It's exacerbating existing forms of racial profiling and discrimination in everything from public housing to the criminal justice system.
But the companies that make facial recognition assure us this bias is a bug, not a feature, and that they can fix it. And they might be right. Face scanning algorithms for many purposes will improve over time. But facial recognition becoming more accurate doesn't make it less of a threat to human rights. This technology is dangerous when it's broken, but at a mass scale, it's even more dangerous when it works. And it will still disproportionately harm our society's most vulnerable members.
Persistent monitoring and policing of our behavior breeds conformity, benefits tyrants, and enriches elites.
We need spaces that are free from government and societal intrusion in order to advance as a civilization. If technology makes it so that laws can be enforced 100 percent of the time, there is no room to test whether those laws are just. If the U.S. government had ubiquitous facial recognition surveillance 50 years ago when homosexuality was still criminalized, would the LGBTQ rights movement ever have formed? In a world where private spaces don't exist, would people have felt safe enough to leave the closet and gather, build community, and form a movement? Freedom from surveillance is necessary for deviation from social norms as well as to dissent from authority, without which societal progress halts.
Persistent monitoring and policing of our behavior breeds conformity, benefits tyrants, and enriches elites. Drawing a line in the sand around tech-enhanced surveillance is the fundamental fight of this generation. Lining up to get our faces scanned to participate in society doesn't just threaten our privacy, it threatens our humanity, and our ability to be ourselves.
[Editor's Note: Read the opposite perspective here.]
Patients, family voice hope and relief as FDA gives only its third-ever drug approval for ALS
On Sept. 29, the FDA approved Relyvrio, a new drug for ALS, even though a study of 137 ALS patients did not result in “substantial evidence” that Relyvrio was effective.
At age 52, Glen Rouse suffered from arm weakness and a lot of muscle twitches. “I first thought something was wrong when I could not throw a 50-pound bag of dog food over the tailgate of my truck—something I use to do effortlessly,” said the 54-year-old resident of Anderson, California, about three hours north of San Francisco.
In August, Rouse retired as a forester for a private timber company, a job he had held for 31 years. The impetus: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a progressive neuromuscular disease that is commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, named after the New York Yankees’ first baseman who succumbed to it less than a month shy of his 40th birthday in 1941. ALS eventually robs an individual of the ability to talk, walk, chew, swallow and breathe.
Rouse is now dependent on ventilation through a nasal mask and uses a powerchair to get around. “I can no longer walk or use my arms very well,” he said. “I can still move my wrists and fingers. I can also transfer from my chair to the toilet if I have two of my friends help me.”
It’s “shocking” that modern medicine has very little to offer to people with this devastating condition, Rouse said. But there is hope on the horizon. Yesterday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Relyvrio, a drug made up of two parts, sodium phenylbutyrate and taurursodiol, to treat patients with ALS.
“This approval provides another important treatment option for ALS, a life-threatening disease that currently has no cure,” said Billy Dunn, director of the Office of Neuroscience in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, in a statement. “The FDA remains committed to facilitating the development of additional ALS treatments.”
Until this point, the FDA had approved only two other medications—Riluzole (rilutek) in 1995 and Radicava (edaravone) in 2017—to extend life in patients with ALS, which typically kills within two to five years after diagnosis. That’s why earlier this week, Rouse was optimistic about the FDA’s likely approval of a controversial new drug for ALS.
When Relyvrio is taken in addition to Riluzole, it appears to slow functional decline by an additional 25 percent and extend life by another 6 to 10 months, said Richard Bedlak, director of the Duke ALS Clinic. “It is not a cure, but it is definitely a step forward.”
“The whole ALS community is extremely excited about it,” he said the day before Relyvrio’s expected approval. “We are very hopeful. We’re on pins and needles.”
A study of 137 ALS patients did not result in “substantial evidence” that Relyvrio was effective, the agency’s Peripheral and Central Nervous System Drugs Advisory Committee concluded in March. However, after some persuasion from FDA officials, patients and their families, the committee met again and decided to recommend approving the drug.
In January 2019, following an ALS diagnosis in October the previous year, Jeff Sarnacki, of Chester, Maryland, was accepted into a trial for Relyvrio. “Because of the trial, we did experience hope and a greater sense of help than had we not had that opportunity,” said Juliet Taylor, his wife and caregiver. They both believed the drug “worked for him in giving him more time.”
In June 2019, Sarnacki chose an open-label extension, offered to patients by drug researchers after a study ends, and took the active drug until he died peacefully at home under hospice care in May 2020, five days after his 60th birthday. A retired agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who later worked as a security consultant, Sarnacki lived about 19 months after diagnosis, which is shorter than the typical prognosis.
His symptoms had begun with leg cramps and foot drop in late fall 2017. At the end of life, he could only move a few fingers on his left hand and could not speak or eat by mouth; a feeding tube became necessary, Taylor said. He also took Radicava and Riluzole, the two previously approved drugs, for his ALS. “We were both incredulous that, so many years after Lou Gehrig’s own diagnosis, there were so few treatments available,” she said.
The dearth of successful treatments for ALS is “certainly not for lack of trying,” said Karen Raley Steffens, a registered nurse and ALS support services coordinator at the Les Turner ALS Foundation in Skokie, Ill. “There are thousands of researchers and scientists all over the world working tirelessly to try to develop treatments for ALS.”
Unfortunately, she adds, research takes time and exorbitant amounts of funding, while bureaucratic challenges persist. The rare disease also manifests and progresses in many different ways, so many treatments are needed.
As of 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that more than 31,000 people in the U.S. live with ALS, and an average of 5,000 people are newly diagnosed every year.
Most cases of ALS are sporadic, meaning that doctors don’t know the cause. There is about a one-year interval between symptom onset and an ALS diagnosis for most patients, so many motor neurons are lost by the time individuals can enroll in a clinical trial, said Richard Bedlack, professor of neurology and director of the Duke ALS Clinic in Durham, North Carolina.
Bedlack found the new drug, Relyvrio, to be “very promising,” which is why he testified to the FDA in favor of approval. (He’s a consultant and disease state speaker for multiple companies including Amylyx, manufacturer of Relyvrio.)
The “drug has different mechanisms of action than the currently approved treatments,” said Bedlack, who is also chief of neurology at the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He adds that, when Relyvrio is taken in addition to Riluzole, it appears to slow functional decline by an additional 25 percent and extend life by another 6 to 10 months. “It is not a cure, but it is definitely a step forward.”
T. Scott Diesing, a neurohospitalist and director of general neurology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, said he hopes the drug is “as good as people anticipated it should be, because there are not too many options for these patients.”
So far, Rouse's voice is holding up, but he knows the day will come when ALS will steal that and much more from him.
ALS is 100 percent fatal, with some patients dying as soon as a year after diagnosis. A few have lasted as long as 15 years, but those are the exceptions, Diesing said.
“If this drug can provide even months of additional life, or would maintain quality of life, that’s a big deal,” he notes, adding that “the patients are saying, ‘I know it’s not proven conclusively, but what do we have to lose?’ So, they would like to try it while additional studies are ongoing.” The drug has already been approved in Canada.
As his disease progresses, Rouse hopes to get a speech-to-text voice-generating computer that he can control with his eyes. So far, his voice is holding up, but he knows the day will come when ALS will steal that and much more from him. He works at I AM ALS, a patient-led community, and six of his friends have already died of the disease.
“Every time I lose a friend to ALS, I grieve and am sad but I resolve myself to keep working harder for them, myself and others,” Rouse said. “People living with ALS find great purpose in life advocating and trying to make a difference.”
Friday Five Podcast: New drug may slow the rate of Alzheimer's disease
On September 27, pharmaceuticals Biogen and Eisai announced that their drug, lecanemab, can slow the rate of Alzheimer's disease, according to a clinical trial. Today's Friday Five episode covers this story and other health research over the month of September.
The Friday Five covers important stories in health and science research that you may have missed - usually over the previous week, but today's episode is a lookback on important studies over the month of September.
Most recently, on September 27, pharmaceuticals Biogen and Eisai announced that a clinical trial showed their drug, lecanemab, can slow the rate of Alzheimer's disease. There are plenty of controversies and troubling ethical issues in science – and we get into many of them in our online magazine – but this news roundup focuses on scientific creativity and progress to give you a therapeutic dose of inspiration headed into the weekend and the new month.
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This Friday Five episode covers the following studies published and announced over the past month:
- A new drug is shown to slow the rate of Alzheimer's disease
- The need for speed if you want to reduce your risk of dementia
- How to refreeze the north and south poles
- Ancient wisdom about Neti pots could pay off for Covid
- Two women, one man and a baby
Matt Fuchs is the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org. He is also a contributing reporter to the Washington Post and has written for the New York Times, Time Magazine, WIRED and the Washington Post Magazine, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @fuchswriter.