San Francisco became in May the first jurisdiction to ban law enforcement use of facial recognition technology. Civil libertarians persuaded the city's Board of Supervisors to pass the measure on the grounds that the government could abuse the technology and make the country more of an oppressive surveillance state.

That same month, the California State Assembly passed a less comprehensive bill that would simply ban law enforcement use of realtime body camera facial recognition technology. Here are the bill's chief justifications for the ban:

The use of facial recognition and other biometric surveillance is the functional equivalent of requiring every person to show a personal photo identification card at all times in violation of recognized constitutional rights. This technology also allows people to be tracked without consent. It would also generate massive databases about law-abiding Californians, and may chill the exercise of free speech in public places. Facial recognition and other biometric surveillance technology has been repeatedly demonstrated to misidentify women, young people, and people of color and to create an elevated risk of harmful "false positive" identifications. Facial and other biometric surveillance would corrupt the core purpose of officer-worn body-worn cameras by transforming those devices from transparency and accountability tools into roving surveillance systems.