LAKELAND, Fla. (WFLA) — The Lakeland Downtown Development Authority (LDDA) has reversed course on using cameras with facial recognition technology citing a possible lawsuit from the ACLU.
“The harmful effects of pointless litigation that the LDDA cannot afford outweigh the small benefits that facial recognition would provide. We have instructed our service provider to disable the FRT software,” LDDA Executive Director Julie Townsend wrote in a statement released Thursday.
The LDDA was in the process of installing more than a dozen surveillance cameras in the city center that were equipped with facial recognition technology. Pictures of three men who have trespassed on the property and threatened employees in the past have been uploaded to the system, according to Townsend. Whenever the cameras detected them in the city center, the system notified officers.
Townsend said one of the men held an LDDA employee captive in her office for a short time. Another man had “a long-standing record of threats, harassment and aggressive behavior that led to a restraining order being taken out against him several years ago by an inner-city property owner and was trespassed from multiple businesses.”
The ACLU previously told News Channel 8 that the facial recognition aspect of the cameras is a violation of privacy rights.
“The reversal of the LDDA is a major victory for Floridians’ right to privacy. By introducing facial recognition to this surveillance network, Lakeland has gone where virtually no other jurisdiction in this country has been willing to go. This type of AI-powered surveillance camera network would give the government truly unprecedented power to identify and track us as we go about our daily lives,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said in a statement.
Townsend said the cameras without facial recognition will help notify others of threats to people and property.
“If anyone thinks we are innovators in the American surveillance state, public and private, they are terribly naive. This software feature is standard on most cameras. What is not standard is the obligation to explain to the public what we wanted to do and why,” Townsend wrote.