On May 14, 2019, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed the “Stop Secret Surveillance” ordinance (File No. 190110), making San Francisco the first major US city to prohibit its own departments from using facial recognition technology. The ordinance, sponsored by Supervisor Aaron Peskin, amended the city’s Administrative Code to add a chapter governing the acquisition and use of surveillance technology.
Two distinct measures sit in the ordinance. The narrow, headline-grabbing one is an outright ban on city use of facial recognition. Its findings state the rationale directly: “The propensity for facial recognition technology to endanger civil rights and civil liberties substantially outweighs its purported benefits, and the technology will exacerbate racial injustice and threaten our ability to live free of continuous government monitoring.”
The broader and more durable part is a process. For any other surveillance technology a city department wants to acquire or keep using, the ordinance requires a Board-approved Surveillance Technology Policy and a Surveillance Impact Report, plus an annual audit by the City Controller. The findings frame this around the observation that “surveillance efforts have historically been used to intimidate and oppress certain communities and groups more than others,” and insist that “legally enforceable safeguards” be in place before any such technology is deployed.
The ban applied to city agencies, including police, but not to federal facilities such as the airport or to private businesses and individuals. Even so, it set off a wave: Oakland, Berkeley, Somerville, Boston, and other US cities passed comparable bans over the following two years, and “facial recognition ban” entered the national policy vocabulary.