‘An Invisible Cage’: How China Is Policing the Future
New York TimesNov 25, 2022
The Facts
As the 12M-strong Brazilian megalopolis of São Paulo prepares to install tens of thousands of facial recognition surveillance cameras, rights activists have expressed concerns that this project may have negative consequences such as aggravating racism and inequality.
Critics fear that the Smart Sampa system — meant to help enhance security amid a surge in muggings in the city — would undermine the right to non-discrimination and privacy while also threatening the principle of presumption of innocence.
The Spin
Left narrative
Facial recognition has a well-known problem of identifying dark-faced people, a flaw that is likely to aggravate racial profiling and lead to wrongful arrests as officers — believing that these programs are foolproof — may use this technology to confirm their own biases. While inevitable, the adoption of facial recognition by law enforcement must be coupled with training on its problems and historical discrimination.
Right narrative
Despite being echoed by the leftist camp and resulting in curtailment of the technology, claims that facial recognition is racist and aggravates disparities toward Black and Brown communities are completely groundless as differences in false positives across races were undetectable among the most accurate algorithms. Rather than racism, the actual issue regarding this technology is privacy.