Last year, the City of Portland banned the use of facial recognition technologies by municipal government and local businesses. While enactment of these facial recognition bans is an important local victory in the fight to protect our biometric privacy, what about use of facial recognition by the federal government?

Federal agencies are exempt from local laws, and although a number of national privacy bills are currently under consideration in Congress, some of those bills would preempt state and local privacy laws like ours. To review the current federal proposals, take a look at the great bill tracker by the International Association of Privacy Professionals located here: https://iapp.org/resources/article/us-federal-privacy-legislation-tracker/

Wondering which of these bills has the best chance of becoming law? Curious what the likelihood is of any privacy bill at all being adopted and implemented at the federal level? Well, you're in luck!

Adam Schwartz, Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has been working on privacy issues, including face surveillance, for over two decades and has agreed to talk with us about the state of the proposed federal bills. Since he'll be joining us and sharing his privacy-related insights, we've also asked him to talk about the Clearview AI lawsuit and how its outcome might affect the public and private use of facial recognition throughout the country.

Bring your questions and join the conversation!

Related article: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/victory-lawsuit-proceeds-against-clearviews-face-surveillance

Speaker bio:

Adam Schwartz joined EFF as a Senior Staff Attorney in 2015. He advocates before courts and legislatures against surveillance and censorship. He has represented travelers subjected to warrantless smartphone searches by border officers, dissidents seeking to speak in government social media, and customers of phone companies that unlawfully sold location data. He has filed amicus briefs addressing the right to record on-duty police, perpetual location-tracking of court-involved people, face surveillance by corporations of consumers, and overbroad laws against so-called "cyber stalking." Through FOIA enforcement litigation, he helped expose new information about AT&T's "Hemisphere" phone snooping program. He has worked to pass bills to protect consumer data privacy, and to stop high-tech surveillance of immigrants.

Previously, Adam worked at the ACLU of Illinois for 19 years, and clerked for Judge Betty B. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He earned a J.D. from Howard University and a B.A. from Cornell University.

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