Merkley, Sanders introduce bill limiting corporate facial recognition

Facial recognition has come under renewed scrutiny in recent months amid nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism launched by the killing of George Floyd.

The technology has been criticized for replicating existing societal racist and sexist biases.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency within the Commerce Department, released an expansive study in December that found that the majority of facial recognition systems have “demographic differentials” that can worsen their accuracy based on a person’s age, gender or race. 

Tech giants like Amazon, IBM and Microsoft have scaled back their sales of the software to law enforcement in response.

Lawmakers, including Merkley, have also proposed legislation that would place a moratorium on federal use of facial recognition.

Tuesday’s legislation tackles its use in other arenas.

“Right now in most states in the US, it would be totally legal for a big box store to set up surveillance cameras, scan the faces of everyone entering the store and compare them to a public mugshot database,” Evan Greer, deputy director of digital rights group Fight for the Future, said in a statement. “That would be enormously invasive, and exacerbate existing forms of discrimination.”