Dive Brief:

• New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has thrown his support behind a bill that would stop public-facing facilities from using facial recognition to collect information on visitors.
• "No one should have to surrender their personal privacy in order to watch their favorite sports team," Samuel Levine, the city's commissioner of consumer and worker protection, said at a press conference Monday outside of Madison Square Garden, according to an NBC 4 video of the event. 
• The bill would ban restaurants, bars, entertainment venues, stores and other places of public accommodation from using biometric recognition technology to verify or identify people on the premises. If the technology is deployed, facilities would have to get the consent of the people who are surveilled and they’ll have to protect, and have a written policy on, the data they collect. People could sue if they think data was collected improperly.

Dive Insight:

The high-profile resistance to the spread of Flock cameras, which track people while they’re driving or walking for sharing with law enforcement agencies, follows concerns over other types of surveillance technology. Wegman’s took heat earlier this year when it expanded its use of biometric scanning to its New York City stores. And the American Civil Liberties Union in a January blog post called out Rite Aid’s use of the technology, which the company said was to curb thefts, for the technology’s inaccuracies, among other things. 

There were “numerous problems” with Rite Aid’s program, according to the ACLU. A 2024 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission included a five-year ban on the company’s use of facial recognition surveillance.

Critics at the Madison Square Garden press conference pointed to the arena as a textbook case of why a ban is needed. They pointed to allegations that the arena uses the technology to ban, among others, lawyers who worked at firms that have litigated against it.

"Surveillance [of this type] opens the door to abuse,” Levine said. 

A Wired article published earlier this year reported on allegations that the arena makes liberal use of the technology. “One court filing estimated the number of banned attorneys at over 1,500,” says the Wired report. A lawyer representing the arena told the publication the number was probably closer to 900.  

In a statement emailed to Facilities Dive, an arena spokesperson said the technology only does what people have always done: recognize faces. “We just do it electronically,” the spokesperson said. 

Following Mamdani’s support, enough city council members announced their backing of the ban, introduced in January by City Councilmember Shahana Hanif, to push support to more than a majority of the council, the Gothamist reported. 

Hanif said in a press release for Fight for the Future, which supports the bill, that she's worried about profiling. “Corporations [that] deploy facial recognition without meaningful limits [could] use it to track, profile, and blacklist people they don’t like,” she said.  

No vote on the bill, called Ban the Scan, has been scheduled, the NBC 4 report said.