Boston's city council unanimously voted to ban the city from using facial recognition technology.

The latest law comes amid refocused criticism of facial recognition sparked by demonstrations of anti-police violence following George Floyd's death. The law makes it illegal for city officials to have the controversial software "obtain, retain, possess, access, or use."

Boston is Massachusetts' sixth city to prohibit the use of facial recognition by the government and the largest city on the East Coast.

San Francisco, Oakland, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, previously imposed similar bans on the controversial technology as racially discriminatory and a threat to civil liberty.

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Will it avoid racial and gender biases?

Boston's points to racial and gender biases that plague the technology.

Councillor Ricardo Arroyo, one of the bill's sponsors, said the technology is wildly inaccurate for people of color. He added that "[technology] also has a kind of chilling effect on civil liberties."

"While face surveillance is [harmful] to all people, [regardless of] the color of their skin," Councilor Arroyo said. He added technology is "a particularly serious" threat to Black and brown people. 

Highlighting the technology's racist existence, councilor Michelle Wu, the other author of the legislation, cited a recent case in Michigan where an African-American man was charged after a facial recognition system misidentified himself.

Research by MIT found that facial recognition systems had an error rate of up to 35% for darker-skinned women.

Arroyo, the bill's sponsor, explained any kind of surveillance technology could suppress free speech when people see so much political action in marches and demonstrations for justice. "[The technology] is dangerous to more or less track democracy or democracy," he added.

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Banned!

Once signed into law, the ordinance will prevent the city from using facial recognition technology or obtaining surveillance software with the technology. 

The law provides certain exceptions, such as allowing town workers to use facial recognition for authentication purposes, such as accessing their own devices or using face detection to write faces in pictures automatically.

The American Civil Liberties Union-Massachusetts pushed for a Beacon Hill bill to establish a government-wide moratorium on facial surveillance to protect the public's interest.

The Boston bill is now being moved to the office of Democratic Mayor Marty Walsh, VOA's report said. If he does not take any action in 15 days, it will become law automatically.

Although the Boston Police Department still does not use the technology, the department could access that equipment with a software update, WBUR said.

In December, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency within the Department of Commerce, published a comprehensive study that found that most facial recognition systems have "demographic differentials" that may worsen their accuracy based on a person's age, gender or ethnicity.

In recent weeks, the opposition to facial recognition placed pressure on tech companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, to restrict their app sales to state and local law enforcement.

However, critics of the movements of the companies questioned whether these steps are merely convenient PR tactics.