To all campus administrators:

We are a group of academic faculty and staff who oppose the use of facial recognition on college campuses. We believe it is our duty to protect our campuses as learning environments where our students, fellow staff, and community members are safe, and that the constant surveillance of facial recognition threatens our human rights and privacy.

Facial recognition poses a unique threat to safety, civil liberties, and academic freedom on campus. It is inherently biased, highlighted by a recent study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology that showed some systems misidentifying people of color up to 100 percent of the time. Such misidentification on campus could result in traumatic interactions with law enforcement, loss of class time, denied access to dorms or other campus buildings, disciplinary action, and potentially a criminal record. Law enforcement and ICE are already using facial recognition to search databases without their knowledge or consent, and college campuses facial recognition systems could provide new data for law enforcement and ICE to mine and target vulnerable populations. The biometric data collected is also a target for hackers and stalkers, and we’ve seen that many schools are ill-equipped to safeguard this data. In the wrong hands, these systems, and the data they generate, could be used to harm students. Facial recognition is invasive, enabling anyone with access to the system to watch students’ movements, try to analyze facial expressions, monitor who they talk to, what they do outside of class, and every move they make.

Adopting facial recognition is not an effective means for increasing security. According to the ACLU, video surveillance does not increase security at all. And the dangers of facial recognition cannot be avoided, whether it’s used in CCTV cameras explicitly for security or for seemingly innocuous purposes like speeding up lines at big campus events or taking attendance in a large lecture hall. The problems with the technology outlined above remain true regardless of how it’s implemented. There is no safe way to deploy facial recognition technology, which is why leading technology and human rights experts have called for it to be banned.

We want to lend our support to students organizing to keep facial recognition off of our campuses. Students should not have to trade their right to safety and privacy for an education. Since facial recognition technology poses too many threats that cannot be avoided, it should not be used at all.

Sincerely,