Thread by @evan_greer

This is exactly how it will happen.

This New York school quietly purchased a facial recognition surveillance system.

When parents, students, and teachers found out, they were outraged.

So school officials went into spin mode. THREAD:

nbcnewyork.com/news/local/ny-…

They held some open meetings and assured parents that they would revise their policies.

Their original plan included using facial recognition, which is notoriously racially biased, to track student attendance and blacklist students who were suspended.

They made some tweaks.

After some pushback, they came back saying that they would only use the system to identify guns, not faces. Sounds reasonable, right?

Then once they got buy in for that, they expanded the scope: now they're scanning faces looking for people on law enforcement watch lists.

And of course, now that the system has been installed, mission creep is inevitable. It's a matter of flipping a switch or uploading a file to take a system that purports to be for student safety and start using it for draconian behavior control.

As Bruce Schneier writes, "Once the technology is in place, there will always be the temptation to use it. And it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state."

Using facial recognition in schools amounts to unethical experimentation on children. We have no idea what the psychological effects of students being under constant, AI-enhanced surveillance will be. But we can guess and it's not good. We need lawmakers to #BanFacialRecognition