I don't get this statement. If s minority already has a apartment lease, how is registering their face data leads to all of that?
- "she feared aggressive landlords could use the tech to issue petty lease violations against tenants, which could eventually lead to their eviction"
Selective enforcement is a tool for capricious abuses. If you allow landlords to spy on their tenants with automated systems, passively collecting vast amounts of data, it's very easy for them to "find" an infraction if they deliberately set out to find one. It empowers petty tyrants.
Your fear is no different than if the landlord had surveillance cameras in public areas of the property, recording 24/7... which they absolutely should anyway.
The tech removes that O(n) search where n is hours recorded, which was the dominating factor making it impractical, and crucially was the only thing that made pervasive recording correspondingly more expensive to mine for violations.
It would also be trivial to pore through those videos and just pick out the ones where the human has dark skin if I'm a racist landlord.
The thing is, I agree with people against this simply on the principle that the landlord shouldn't be able to use facial recognition on tenants without their permission, and the landlord also shouldn't be able to use that lack of agreement to withhold a lease in the first place.
But the race-reductionist arguments being used to prop up this position come off as sophistry. I don't think a landlord in NYC of all places is going to waste time targeting black people that they already gave a lease to an apartment, rather than just targetting shitty tenants. The cameras will probably be able to find people littering in the building, for example. Those are the people you target if the plan is to start kicking people out of the building to improve it.
Yes, but you can't do it at scale. Automation via facial recognition makes it cheap. That's the problem.
I have no problem with an individual person remembering the face of another individual person - I have a problem with a system that allows a landlord to pick out every interaction with any person they choose after the fact for the entire term of the data collection.
If that's the case, then why bring race into it? The racial aspects of the argument infers that such law would only be put in place, in spirit, to protect the privacy of minorities, and not anyone else.
Rather than some call to action, people either roll their eyes or tune it out because of overuse.
Continued tyranny over the poor by the powerful is the real injustice in this story, not racism.
You're saying a technology should be banned because there might be some racist landlord who could leverage it to capture minority tenant lease violations?
First, we already have systems to deal with this sort of behavior. If someone is found selectively applying rules based on race it is typically illegal and punishable.
Second, why would a racist landlord rent to a minority and then spend all of that effort gathering evidence against just that tenant to kick them out?
- if you hook up a decibel meter, being too loud
- loitering
- allowing someone to tailgate
etc.
So if the person/people going into your apartment every day for three months are not you or on your lease, then they evict you.
> he saw it as a sneaky attempt to jack up prices in a gentrifying area and force people like him out.
“They were trying to find ways to expedite ways of flushing people out of the building and then try to market new flipped-over apartments to gentrifiers,” Rogers told Gizmodo.
If the building I’m currently renting in suddenly decides that I’m not a legitimate visitor some random percent of the time, then I’m very likely to move and go somewhere that isn’t going to do that to me. That percentage doesn’t have to be very high; it just has to be higher than a key, which has a success rate approaching 100%.
Edit: forgot to mention: it’s also somewhat common for a building’s owner to change beneath its tenants, with the new owner enacting policies that are clearly intended to flush to old (and therefore less profitable) tenants out. Cameras that track the activities of tenants and make them feel unwelcome would typify this kind of policy, even before any racial bias in the technology itself.