At a raucous city council hearing, lawmakers and activists alike argued in favor of bills banning biometric tech in residential buildings and large venues.
Brooklyn resident Fabian Rogers knew he had to act in 2018 when his penny-pinching landlord suddenly attempted to install a facial recognition camera in the entrance of a rent-stabilized building he’d called home for years. Under the new security system, all tenants and their loved ones would be forced to submit to a face scan to enter the building. The landlord, like many others, tried to sell the controversial tech as a safety enhancement, but Rogers told Gizmodo he saw it as a sneaky attempt to jack up prices in a gentrifying area and force people like him out.
“They were trying to find ways to expedite ways of flushing people out of the building and then try to market new flipped-over apartments to gentrifiers,” Rogers told Gizmodo.
Rogers says he tried to speak out against what he saw as an invasive new security measure but quickly realized there weren’t any laws on the books preventing his landlord from implementing the technology. Instead, he and his tenant association had to go on a “muckraking tour” attacking the landlord’s reputation with an online shame campaign. Remarkably, it worked. The exhausted landlord backed off. Rogers now advocates against facial recognition on the state and national levels.
Despite his own success, Rogers said he’s seen increasing efforts by landlords in recent years to deploy facial recognition and other biometric identifiers in residential buildings. A first-of-its-kind law discussed during a fiery New York City Council hearing Wednesday, however, seeks to make that practice illegal once and for all. Rogers spoke in support of the proposed legislation, as did multiple city council members.
“We are here to address an invisible but urgent issue that affects all New Yorkers: the use of biometric surveillance technology,” Council member Jennifer Gutiérrez said in a statement. “It is our responsibility as elected officials to thoroughly examine its potential benefits and risks.”
Council members expressed repeated concerns over the ability of private businesses and landlords to abuse biometric identifiers or sell them off to third parties on Wednesday. Council member Carlina Rivera, who is sponsoring a bill restricting facial recognition in residential areas, said she feared aggressive landlords could use the tech to issue petty lease violations against tenants, which could eventually lead to their eviction. If left unchecked, she said, racially biased algorithms driving these systems risked further fueling gentrification, which threatened to, “erode what should be a diverse collective identity in the city.
