Face Surveillance in Massachusetts: Preserving Your Rights

Nov 14, 2023 - Hear from the ACLU of Massachusetts’ Director of Technology for Liberty, Kade Crockford, about the "Press Pause on Face Surveillance" campaign, and what you can do to help ensure new technologies, including AI, don’t eclipse our basic rights.
Face surveillance systems are computer programs designed to analyze images of human faces to identify and track people at a distance, without their knowledge or consent. Private companies marketing this technology to government agencies boast that it can monitor people in real-time, reconstruct past movements from video footage, perform “emotion detection,” and uniquely identify hundreds of individuals from a single photo.
The ACLU of Massachusetts' "Press Pause on Face Surveillance" campaign seeks to educate the public on the civil liberties concerns posed by face surveillance technology and the need for our state legislature prohibit the use of the technology to track us in public and strengthen existing protections in the law. The ACLU has worked to pass bans on municipal use of face surveillance technology in Easthampton, Boston, Springfield, Cambridge, Northampton, Brookline, and Somerville.
Kade Crockford is the Director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts. Kade works on issues at the intersection of technology and civil rights and civil liberties, focusing on how systems of surveillance and control impact not just the society in general but their primary targets-people of color, Muslims, immigrants, and dissidents. Recently, Kade led the ACLU of Massachusetts’ Press Pause on Face Surveillance campaign, which has thus far won the passage of a state law regulating police use of facial recognition, and eight municipal bans on government use of face surveillance technology, including in Massachusetts’ four largest cities.
Kade is also a co-founder and manager of the ACLU of Massachusetts’ Data for Justice project, which uses data science to advance civil rights and civil liberties public education and law reform. Find Kade's blog, Privacy Matters, at privacysos.org/blog, the ACLU of Massachusetts' dedicated privacy and technology website.