Press Pause on Face Surveillance

(updated June 2023: 5 Year Timeline)

The ACLU of Massachusetts' "Press Pause on Face Surveillance" campaign seeks to educate the public on the civil liberties concerns posed by face surveillance technology and the need for our state legislature prohibit the use of the technology to track us in public and strengthen existing protections in the law. Meanwhile, the ACLU has worked to pass bans on municipal use of face surveillance technology in Easthampton, Boston, Springfield, Cambridge, Northampton, Brookline, and Somerville.

Face surveillance systems are computer programs designed to analyze images of human faces to identify and track people at a distance, without their knowledge or consent. Private companies marketing this technology to government agencies boast that it can monitor people in real-time, reconstruct past movements from video footage, perform “emotion detection,” and uniquely identify hundreds of individuals from a single photo.