Facial recognition technologies are being implemented around the world. While some uses of facial recognition, like unlocking your phone, may be convenient, others allow your facial information to be collected, used, and shared, without your knowledge or consent. Both governments and companies are now using this technology, often with little to no oversight or rules in place. In addition to transparency issues, facial recognition software programs have varying degrees of accuracy and have been shown to be less reliable when analyzing people of color, women, and children.

Because of these issues, some cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, and Somerville, MA, have banned government agencies from using facial recognition. Portland city officials are also considering a facial recognition ban and are looking to go a step further and address use by private entities as well.

There are many details to consider when adopting technologies like facial recognition, which can be used for surveillance. What are the costs and benefits? Who will be the target of the surveillance? Will it make us safer? What are we giving up in exchange for that safety? And should the technology be adopted at all?

On June 15th, join us for a combined event, with local privacy group PDX Privacy, where we'll ask our knowledgeable panelists the answers to these questions. We'll explore the risks of facial recognition technology, the ways it affects various groups of people, and how we can preserve our privacy and protect our communities.

We'll have a Q&A period via the chat box, but you can also send questions in advance to [email protected], and we'll work to get them into the discussion.

Moderator: Chris Bushick (PDX Privacy)

Panelists:

• Sarah Hamid - CAIR Oregon

• Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty - Portland City Council

• Nathan "nash" Sheard - Electronic Frontier Foundation

• Clare Garvie - Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law

By attending this TA3M meeting, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct: https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/

{short} Code of Conduct Portland's Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays is dedicated to providing an informative and positive experience for everyone who participates in or supports our community, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, socioeconomic status, caste, or creed.

Our events are intended to educate and share information related to technology and activism, and anyone who is there for this purpose is welcome. Because we value the safety and security of our members and strive to have an inclusive community, we do not tolerate harassment of members or event participants in any form.

Audio and video recording are not permitted at meetings without prior approval.

Our Code of Conduct (https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/) applies to all events run by Portland's TA3M. Please report any incidents to the event organizer.

Last month, we had a great panel discussion about the use of facial recognition technologies, where we looked at the accuracy of the technology as well as how it affects various groups of people and their civil rights. Due to a number of issues surrounding the technology, several cities have banned government agencies from using facial recognition, and there's currently a similar effort at the federal level.

In August, the City of Portland will consider two bills that ban the use of facial recognition technologies within the City. One bill addresses use by public agencies, and the other addresses private use.

Hector Dominguez, the Open Data Coordinator at Smart City PDX, within Portland's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, is one of the chief authors of the proposed bills and will join us this month to discuss what each piece of legislation covers and how the bans, if approved, will work. He'll also talk about the internal efforts to develop a privacy toolkit that includes privacy impact and risk assessments, guidelines, and a Privacy Champions Network.

Links to drafts of the legislation and the City Code amendment are available on the meeting registration page at: https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/events/271802710/

Bring your questions and join the discussion. We hope to see you there!

Speaker bio:

Hector Dominguez is the Open Data Coordinator at the City of Portland. In 2009, Portland became the first city in the United States to adopt an Open Data Resolution to encourage the expansion of the technological community by promoting open data and partnerships between City government and the public, private and nonprofit sectors, academia, and labor.

By attending this TA3M meeting, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct: https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/

{short} Code of Conduct Portland's Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays is dedicated to providing an informative and positive experience for everyone who participates in or supports our community, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, socioeconomic status, caste, or creed.

Our events are intended to educate and share information related to technology and activism, and anyone who is there for this purpose is welcome. Because we value the safety and security of our members and strive to have an inclusive community, we do not tolerate harassment of members or event participants in any form.

Audio and video recording are not permitted at meetings without prior approval.

Our Code of Conduct (https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/) applies to all events run by Portland's TA3M. Please report any incidents to the event organizer.

Digital and physical surveillance are at all-time highs, and privacy is dissipating from our society. But why should we care about privacy if we have nothing to hide?

In this session, AJ Rice will discuss how a lack of privacy affects us as individuals and as a society. Using specific examples, Rice will cover the direct consequences of a world without privacy and also the more subtle ways an absence of privacy undermines the rights of those who have nothing to hide. This presentation will focus specifically on why privacy matters, and not on what we should do about it.

Bring your questions and join the discussion. We hope to see you there!

Speaker bio:

AJ Rice is a privacy advocate, and the founder & CEO of Privo Mobile. Privo Mobile is a Portland-based tech startup making (private) dumb phones designed for kids with a modern user experience and interface.

By attending this TA3M meeting, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct: https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/

{short} Code of Conduct Portland's Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays is dedicated to providing an informative and positive experience for everyone who participates in or supports our community, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, socioeconomic status, caste, or creed.

Our events are intended to educate and share information related to technology and activism, and anyone who is there for this purpose is welcome. Because we value the safety and security of our members and strive to have an inclusive community, we do not tolerate harassment of members or event participants in any form.

Audio and video recording are not permitted at meetings without prior approval.

Our Code of Conduct (https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/) applies to all events run by Portland's TA3M. Please report any incidents to the event organizer.

On September 9th, the Portland City Council passed two facial recognition ban bills. With the first, the City joined a group of thirteen other cities in addressing use of the technology by public agencies. Portland went a step further, though, and became the first city in the US, and possibly the world, to also ban use of facial recognition technology by private entities!

While banning facial recognition limits tracking of our faces as we go about our daily lives, a number of other biometric technologies such as gait recognition, iris and retina scans, and heartbeat recognition can be used to work around these bans. Even non-biometric technologies, like automatic license plate readers (ALPR) and social media monitoring, can also be used to track our movements and actions. For this reason, the City must also consider limiting use of other surveillance technologies and create a broader surveillance ordinance.

Several US cities, including Seattle, Oakland, and Somerville, MA, have adopted such ordinances, which typically require public input as well as City Council approval before surveillance technologies can be used by government agencies.

This presentation will cover a brief overview of the Seattle Surveillance Ordinance, recommendations for Portland privacy/tech activists about passing a Portland Surveillance Ordinance, and recent activism happening regarding the use of biometric technologies at the Port of Seattle (namely at SeaTac airport). The overarching focus will be more on specific takeaways for Portland based on what activists have learned in Seattle. It will also touch on the broader collection of biometric information. Since Seattle has one of the earliest Surveillance Ordinances in the nation, it also has a number of imperfections (like any beta or v1 software). There are some important lessons that Portland could learn from Seattle, in the hopes of Portland eventually having a stronger Surveillance Ordinance of its own.

The first roughly 45 minutes will consist of the presentation and the remaining time is set aside for questions and discussion. Please bring your questions! We hope for a lively and interactive discussion after the presentation.

Speaker bio:

The speaker has nearly a decade of experience working in tech, primarily in cybersecurity. More recently, they've been civically engaged in regards to surveillance technology in the greater Seattle, WA area.

By attending this TA3M meeting, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct: https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/

{short} Code of Conduct Portland's Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays is dedicated to providing an informative and positive experience for everyone who participates in or supports our community, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, socioeconomic status, caste, or creed.

Our events are intended to educate and share information related to technology and activism, and anyone who is there for this purpose is welcome. Because we value the safety and security of our members and strive to have an inclusive community, we do not tolerate harassment of members or event participants in any form.

Audio and video recording are not permitted at meetings without prior approval.

Our Code of Conduct (https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/) applies to all events run by Portland's TA3M. Please report any incidents to the event organizer.

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.

By attending this TA3M meeting, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct:

{short} Code of Conduct Portland's Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays is dedicated to providing an informative and positive experience for everyone who participates in or supports our community, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, socioeconomic status, caste, or creed.

Our events are intended to educate and share information related to technology and activism, and anyone who is there for this purpose is welcome. Because we value the safety and security of our members and strive to have an inclusive community, we do not tolerate harassment of members or event participants in any form.

Audio and video recording are not permitted at meetings without prior approval.

Our Code of Conduct (https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/) applies to all events run by Portland's TA3M. Please report any incidents to the event organizer.

After passing a privacy resolution and two facial recognition bans, City of Portland staff are now working on drafting a policy for a surveillance ordinance for Portland. This surveillance technologies policy will focus on how the City of Portland uses, procures, and manages surveillance technologies and information.

And the policy drafters want input from you!

At this month's meeting, learn about the development of Portland's surveillance ordinance and how you can participate. Because of the complexity of such a policy, its development will be divided into three separate modules, with a discussion of the first module beginning on Wednesday, March 16th. Hector Dominguez, Open Data Coordinator at Smart City PDX, within Portland's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, will join us at this meeting to explain the City's planned process for developing the policy and how community members can share their thoughts and insights.

Come to the meeting, join the conversation, and help create a strong and effective surveillance policy for Portland!

Please RSVP via the Meetup page or by sending an email to [email protected]. Meetup meeting page: https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/events/284474458/

Speaker bio:

Hector Dominguez is the Open Data Coordinator at the City of Portland. In 2009, Portland became the first city in the United States to adopt an Open Data Resolution to encourage the expansion of the technological community by promoting open data and partnerships between City government and the public, private and nonprofit sectors, academia, and labor.

By attending this TA3M meeting, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct: https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/

{short} Code of Conduct Portland's Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays is dedicated to providing an informative and positive experience for everyone who participates in or supports our community, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, socioeconomic status, caste, or creed.

Our events are intended to educate and share information related to technology and activism, and anyone who is there for this purpose is welcome. Because we value the safety and security of our members and strive to have an inclusive community, we do not tolerate harassment of members or event participants in any form.

Audio and video recording are not permitted at meetings without prior approval.

Our Code of Conduct (https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/) applies to all events run by Portland's TA3M. Please report any incidents to the event organizer.