New NYPD technology (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)

Many of you have heard some of the horror stories already, how facial recognition technology can track our movements in truly creepy ways. For some people, the moment of realization came last winter, when a mother wasejected from the Rockettes and threatened with separation from her daughter through use of

An NYPD command center (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)

Schools are safe, but the rest of New York is at risk. This is the reality of facial recognition in the Empire State, where facial recognition is now illegal in schools, but remains all too present in other aspects of life.

The landmark law was lost in the 2020 chaos, signed by Governor Cuomo without any public statement on Christmas Eve. Still, even without the fanfare, it remains the law, and a long overdue law at that. New York may be the first state in the country to ban school facial

An NYPD command center (photo: Edward Reed/Mayor's Office)

In the four months since the NYPD first published protocols limiting its use of facial recognition software, the coronavirus-caused state of emergency and recent civil unrest over police brutality made the considerable leeway in the policy all but total. Absent any formal legal framework at the city, state or federal level, the internal, non-binding departmental protocols are the only public policy governing New York's lawless frontier of biometric surveillance.

The police department has insisted it

Facial recognition could be useful in the post-coronavirus world (photo: Security Industry Association)

As a native New Yorker, I am saddened that New York has been hardest hit by the COVID-19 virus. The very way of life for New Yorkers – close living and working conditions, reliance on a round-the-clock crowded mass transit system, a vibrant restaurant and bar scene, movie and live performance theaters, national and international transportation hubs, sporting facilities with tens of thousands of seats and over a million children in the

(photo: William Alatriste/City Council)

Sometimes City Hall politics can be surreal; too much spin can give you a case of political vertigo. But this week was remarkable even by the standards of the de Blasio administration, with talking points that felt like messages from a parallel universe. Time and again, we heard lofty statements about a city committed to protecting its residents’ privacy, a city sadly bearing no resemblance to our own.

It started when the national facial recognition debate came to the City Council chambers. Months