Stop Biometric Spread : Veto Assembly Bill 751

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Stop Biometric Spread : Veto AB 751

We need to ask for your help once again.

A bill in front of the governor called Assembly Bill 751, which is authored by Assembly member Jacqui Irwin (D-Ventura), threatens to enable the spread of biometric technology to local governments throughout California starting in 2025.

AB 751 is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Nominally, the bill is about making it easier for Californians to access their vital records from county recorders without having to visit a notary public. But the price of this convenience includes authorizing the use of any and all kinds of biometric technology for identity verification at all of California's county recorder offices.

After our op-ed appeared in the San Jose Mercury News talking about the most notorious kind of biometric identification, facial recognition, the bill was amended to impose a 3 year moratorium on the biometrics portion. But once that 3 year period runs out, anything goes, with no further authorization required.

The California county recorders association, which sponsored the bill, told privacy advocates that they don't care about the biometrics part and would be fine with removing it from the bill. But the bill's author, Assembly member Irwin has refused. Irwin's spouse is an executive vice-president at Amazon Ring.

Biometric identification is an extremely broad category, ranging from facial recognition to voice recognition, iris scanning, wrist and vein recognition, gait analysis, DNA and the more pedestrian fingerprints. But much of it is untested, and what is tested shows racial and gender disparities due to a lack of coding diversity, and stockpiles of scans and specimens are vulnerable to hacking.

The bill is asking us to issue a blank check for counties to acquire and use *any* biometric technology, including possible future methods we don't even know about yet. With no guardrails in place. That's wildly irresponsible.

We don't need to speculate that governments can fool around with biometric technologies without clear authorization. Buzzfeed released a list of 1800 agencies, including 140 in California, that used ClearView AI dozens and sometimes hundreds of times. When Buzzfeed contacted these agencies, many denied it, said the use wasn't authorized or that municipal leadership had no idea. What starts in the recorder's office won't necessarily stay there.

Use this easy action to email and/or tweet at the governor and tell him to VETO AB 751.

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Governor Gavin Newsom

Subject: Veto AB 751

Message:

Dear Governor Newsom, I'm writing to express my strong opposition to the biometric identification provisions in Assembly Bill 751. The three year moratorium would expire at the end of 2024 with no requirement to return to the Legislature for explicit authorization for the expansion of biometric technologies throughout the state. Biometric identification methods currently in use include facial recognition, which is known to be flawed and to provide racially disparate results, voice recognition, iris recognition, neck and wrist vein recognition, DNA, gait recognition and fingerprints. None of these, exclusive of fingerprints, has been tested adequately. Fingerprints would likely need to be compared against Department of Motor Vehicles records, which will not be efficient. . The bill sponsors, the Association of County Recorders, had agreed to the removal of biometrics from the bill saying they didn't use biometrics and had no plans to do so, but the author Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin refused. The term "biometrics" can be applied to the use of any biological feature for identification purposes. It is extraordinarily broad. The bill should not provide an open door for the adoption of *any* biometric technique under the sun, with no specific guardrails or limitations on the use of third party contractors. If, at the end of the three year moratorium, there is a proposal for a specific kind of biometric identification that has been adequately tested, shows no racial, age or gender disparities, and that proposal is accompanied by specific protective protocols, that proposal can be evaluated on its merits. But only if you do not issue this wide-ranging blank check for *all* biometric technologies in 2021. I beg you not to do so. It has already been demonstrated that the use of powerful, invasive technologies is not always implemented in a careful way. As Buzzfeed reported in April, over 140 California agencies, including several state agencies, engaged in ad-hoc testing of the Clearview AI facial recognition system, whose database of trillions of images were illegally scraped from social media without consent. When Buzzfeed contacted spokespeople about the records of use, at least half of the agencies stated the use was unknown and unauthorized by agency leadership, even though in some cases it happened hundreds of times. Guardrails are not an after-the-fact luxury. They need to be put in place prior to adoption and in a technology-specific way for a particular form of biometrics, not a catch-all set of technologies. Please veto AB 751. Mobile notaries are a functional, effective and privacy protective mode of identity verification for vital records requests. Do not issue an unnecessary blank check for government use of any and all biometrics.

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