New bill would ban facial recognition technology from public housing

A new House bill introduced by a Brooklyn lawmaker would ban biometric and facial recognition technology from federally-funded public housing.

The legislation, dubbed the “No Biometric Barriers to Housing Act,” was introduced by Congresswoman Yvette Clark whose district borders the Atlantic Plaza Towers in Brownsville where tenants made headlines this spring with their fight to keep a facial recognition system out of their apartment complex.

Under the bill, facial, voice, fingerprint, and DNA identification technologies would be prohibited from public housing receiving certain federal aid including “any grant, loan, subsidy, contract, cooperative or other form of financial assistance,” according to the bill.

“Someone living in public housing should not be the guinea pig for the emerging technology of biometric facial screening just to enter their own home,” Clarke said in a statement.

The bill comes amid a wave of public and legislative pushback to the emerging technology that studies have show has a higher error rate for accurately identifying people of color and women. San Francisco, Oakland, and Somerville, Massachusetts have each banned city agencies, including law enforcement, from using facial recognition tech, and lawmakers in cities across the country are mulling similar moves.

In Brownsville, where the Atlantic Plaza Towers are located just beyond Clarke’s district, private landlord Nelson Management Group has applied to the state’s Homes and Community Renewal (HCR) agency, which oversees rent-regulated housing, to install a facial recognition security system in the two-building complex. The landlord’s application to install the tech in the more than 700 rent-stabilized unit development is the first the agency has received involving facial recognition, according to HCR.

The StoneLock technology would scan faces and green-light those who match resident profiles, but tenants have raised red flags about the accuracy of the tech and the prospect of having their locations tracked and shared. Those fears include whether that data could be used in eviction proceedings, or if it could be accessed by the NYPD, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or other government entities.

In May, a group of 134 tenants at Atlantic Plaza Towers filed a challenge to HCR, urging the agency block the keyless system on privacy and ethical grounds.

“The ability to enter your home should not be conditioned on the surrender of your biometric data, particularly when the landlord’s collection, storage, and use of such data is untested and unregulated,” Samar Katnani, the attorney at Brooklyn Legal Services who is representing the tenants, said in a statement. “We are in uncharted waters with the use of facial recognition technology in residential spaces.”

It is unclear if the federal legislation would impact the Atlantic Plaza Towers.

Officials with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), with some 400,000 tenants in 325 public housing complexes, has yet to publicly embrace the technology. Though at least one affordable housing project built in partnership with the city through the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the New York City Housing Development Corporation, and private developer Omni New York was built with a “state of the art facial recognition system.” The 154-unit development in the Concourse Village section of the Bronx was built for low-income families and the formerly homeless.

The House legislation, which is co-sponsored by Massachusetts and Michigan representatives Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, would also mandate the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to compile a report on biometric systems used in federally-assisted public housing in the last five years.

Such a study would explore the purpose of their installation and the impacts of those technologies on residents. Building demographics and the implications of the tech on “vulnerable communities” would also be studied, according to the bill.

“We cannot allow residents of HUD funded properties to be criminalized and marginalized with the use of biometric products like facial recognition technology,” Tlaib said in a statement. “We must be centered on working to provide permanent, safe, and affordable housing to every resident—and unfortunately, this technology does not do that.”