New York tenants fight as landlords embrace facial recognition cameras
At Atlantic Plaza Towers in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, the landlord, Nelson Management Group, is moving to install a new system to control entry into the buildings. It would use facial recognition to open the front door for recognized tenants rather than traditional keys or electronic key fobs.
More than 130 tenants have, however, filed a formal complaintwith the state seeking to block the application.
“We do not want to be tagged like animals,” said Icemae Downes, who has lived at Atlantic Plaza Towers since it opened 51 years ago. “We are not animals. We should be able to freely come in and out of our development without you tracking every movement.”
“The vast majority of commercial deployments are secret,” said Alvaro Bedoya, the founding director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law.
“This turns people’s expectations upside down about their privacy. In 2019, most people expect that when they log online, they’re going to be tracked in some way,” he said. “In public, in real life, most people still think they can be a face in the crowd. And up until the deployment of facial recognition technology, they were right … This lets people be tracked in the real world like they are online, and I think that is a pretty basic invasion into our lives.”