By: Ashmar Mandou

On Tuesday #PressPauseChicago, a coalition of seventy-five groups including Lucy Parsons Labs, the ACLU of Illinois and the National Lawyers Guild, held a press conference to call on Mayor Lori Lightfoot to support a full moratorium on the use of facial recognition technology by all city agencies. The call for a moratorium follows reports by the Chicago Sun-Times that city agencies have accessed inaccurate and racially-biased facial recognition technology for over a decade. The call to press pause on this surveillance in Chicago is amplified by city agencies accessing Clearview AI, a private facial recognition dataset of three billion images gathered off of social media. “Facial recognition technology is racist, with studies showing false positives are returned twice as often for people of color as for white people,” said Lucy Parsons Labs Executive Director, Freddy Martinez. “There are also numerous risks with giving such a large dataset, which could potentially keep millions of children in it, to city agencies with no oversight by the Mayor’s office.  The Mayor’s Office should follow the strong example set by San Francisco and Oakland and work with the community to implement a full ban on this technology.” The broad coalition included labor groups, community organizers, civil liberties organizations, and technologists.