UCLA drops controversial face recognition plan

Jefferson Graham | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption You might be in a police lineup right now and not even know it As police embrace new facial recognition technology, many fear false matches could lead to wrongful arrests.

A major California university has dropped plans to use facial recognition for the surveillance of the campus.

The idea was to have the University of California Los Angeles use facial recognition as a way to gain access to buildings, to prove authenticity and to deny entry to people with restricted access to the campus, matching their faces against a database. Advocacy group Fight for the Future says UCLA was the first major university exploring using facial recognition to monitor students.

The group had tested facial recognition software and found that "dozens" of student-athletes and professors were incorrectly matched with photos from a mug shot database, "and the overwhelming majority of those misidentified were people of color."

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UCLA Vice Chancellor Michael Beck now says the school will not pursue the technology.

"We have determined that the potential benefits are limited and are vastly outweighed by the concerns of our campus community," UCLA said in a statement to USA TODAY.

Students were mobilizing and making their voices heard. At a public meeting to discuss the proposed system in January, student Madeleine Flores told the UCLA newspaper The Daily Bruin, “I don’t want (my family) to have the fear of having their face scanned because a lot of my family are already scared walking on the streets. Having (their information) put into a system," saying it would raise that fear "a thousand percent.”

And in a blistering editorial in The Bruin, editors said the implementation of the technology "would present a major breach of students’ privacy and make students feel unsafe on a campus they are supposed to call home." It is one thing to monitor campus activity with security cameras, the paper said, "but it’s another entirely to automatically identify individuals and track their every move on campus."

Fight for the Future says that some 40 plus students and activists are planning a national day of action March 2 to keep facial recognition off college campuses. Protests are expected to be held on several campuses, including Northeastern in Boston and George Washington in Washington, DC.

On Fight for the Future's Ban Facial Recognition webpage, it asked prominent universities whether they planned to use facial recognition, and says several schools, including Columbia, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they won't.

In a Medium blog post, Fight for the Future deputy director Evan Greer says the test the non-profit ran with facial recognition software "shows how dangerous, and blatantly racist it would be if UCLA had gone ahead with their proposal to implement facial recognition on campus. And it should be a warning to other schools who are considering using this technology."

In 2019, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition by local agencies, later followed by Oakland, California, and a Boston suburb.

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