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BOSTON A new bill on Beacon Hill would provide a set of rules on how officials can use the license plate reading camera systems that are found across the state, including at the Bourne and Sagamore bridges.
The bill, filed by state Rep. Sarah Peake, would provide “guardrails” around automatic license plate readers, which capture drivers license plates and store the information in a state database, according to Peake, D-Provincetown.
If passed, it would be unlawful for state officials to use the readers to monitor or track activity protected under the First Amendment and would limit any data retention to 14 days unless it is connected with a criminal investigation where there is a link between the data and the crime.
How One State Managed to Actually Write Rules on Facial Recognition
Massachusetts is one of the first states to put legislative guardrails around the use of facial recognition technology in criminal investigations.
“One of my concerns was that we would wake up one day in a world resembling that depicted in the Philip K. Dick novel ‘Minority Report’,” said Kade Crockford, an activist at the ACLU of Massachusetts.Credit.Tony Luong for The New York Times
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Though police have been using facial recognition technology for the last two decades to try to identify unknown people in their investigations, the practice of putting the majority of Americans into a perpetual photo lineup has gotten surprisingly little attention from lawmakers and regulators. Until now.
An Israeli biometrics startup with a history of defense contracts has applied for a patent on technology that repositions drones to get a better shot of a person on the ground.