Prohibition is too strict. Better would be to allow opt in, so that my hotel, gym, uber, pizza parlor, etc., could recognize me and customize their service accordingly if I consent.
A ban on facial recognition doesn't mean much if every hotel, gym, and pizza parlor has a shrink-wrap contract or cookie banner [1] forcing you to opt in to their data collection if you want a room or a pizza.
Not anymore. :)
Portland decided that the rights of the individual outweigh the rights of businesses when it comes to this issue. Strongarming people into giving up their privacy won't work. The argument that "if you don't like it, you can go elsewhere" has also been shown to not work when every business is harvesting every bit of personal data they feasibly can.
Before you say "well that's user's rights" I think we're all aware that most people are tech illiterate. They are starting to become aware of the problem but everyone feels completely helpless because they don't even know the first steps (and quite frankly it isn't just laziness, they don't have the literacy rate).
For example, if an unrecognized face was logged on 47th street, then an unrecognized face was logged on 50th, then 52nd, then 55th (where a crime occurred), then back down to 47th, you might be able to draw some patterns about where to look for your suspect even if they hadn't opted in.
Edit: Also, you are trusting that the system isn't storing markers for people it doesn't recognize. My concern would be that if I opt in later, suddenly all my past history becomes discoverable. That's a lot of trust to put in the hands of private firms (or the police), neither of which I'm comfortable holding that information.
In fact if I were a not-quite ethical user of facerec, I'd flag and bin all vectors and image chips that failed to ID.
I work on facerec and ReID. But it's for deep fake detection and the like, blue team stuff. But the deep ID technologies are very concerning to me in general.
Given how prevalent the tracking of users is, anonymous or otherwise, I'd be extremely pessimistic about this assumption.
D.“Places of Public Accommodation”
1.means: Any place or service offering to the public accommodations, advantages, facilities, or privileges whether in the nature of goods, services, lodgings, amusements, transportation or otherwise.
2.does not include: An institution, bona fide club, private residence, or place of accommodation that is in its nature distinctly private.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5967c18bff7c50a0244ff...
A restaurant dining room is public, but the kitchen would be private (IIUC). A private club (ie you register for membership and only members are allowed inside) is private. (Aside: That's how indoor smoking establishments like hookah bars get around anti-smoking laws in Washington state.)
This leaves me uncertain about gyms - that seems more like a country club than a restaurant or hotel?
Plus, in a public place, how do you only apply facial recognition technology to a single person? It seems like in most cases, you must first apply it to everyone else nearby to discriminate them from anyone who opted in.
We'd need something like a once in a lifetime registered consent that service providers would be required to respect quietly and provide non-degraded service to people without the opt-in.
Even this would probably require multiple rounds of regulation iteration to fix the loopholes.