Rights groups call for ban of ‘invasive’ face recognition tech

New York City police department uses more than 15,000 cameras to surveil people with problematic technology, Amnesty International claims.

The New York Police Department is capable of processing images from 15,280 surveillance cameras through “invasive and discriminatory facial recognition software“, according to an Amnesty International investigation published Thursday. The investigation identified the surveillance cameras in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, boroughs of the city, and was conducted by “[t]housands of volunteers from around the world”, according to an Amnesty press release. Facial recognition technology (FRT) often works by scraping a vast amount of images from the internet – often without one’s knowledge – to feed an algorithm that attempts to match photos to a person’s identity.