New York’s Transit Authority Banned From Using Facial Recognition Tech To Identify Fare Jumpers
The most populous city in the United States has a crime problem. What kind of problem depends on who you ask. The DEA will say it’s fentanyl. The NYPD will claim it’s terrorism. The former Manhattan DA will say it’s device encryption (not actually a crime!). But the Metropolitan Transit Authority — which oversees the city’s subway system — will claim it’s something else: a problem too big to be handled without subjecting every passenger to a bit of biometric harvesting.
New York City subway and bus riders who skip paying fares are threatening the fiscal health of the nation’s largest public transportation provider and its ability to improve service, the transit authority’s chief executive said Wednesday.
“This is a fundamental, existential threat to our ability to provide first-class public transit and make it better, more frequent, more reliable,” Janno Lieber said during the agency’s monthly board meeting. “And so we got to push back.”
Ah, the ol’ “existential threat.” When this phrase has been used to describe everything from international terrorism to social media moderation, it kinds of loses all meaning. Normally, existential threats describe something serious, not the easily expected outcome of a public service pricing itself out of the market.
Now, we call all argue over things like whether a publicly-subsidized service should be more affordable or whether it’s ok to just not pay for government services if they seem to be too expensive, but we probably agree that fare jumping — while not desirable — is not an “existential threat.” For it to be an actual threat, it would have to target things that aren’t paid for with public funds and are extremely unlikely to be shut down just because they’re not bringing in as much money as city officials would prefer.
On top of that, the MTA seems to feel there are plenty of other, far more real threats, that need to be addressed. If fare jumping was the real issue, the city probably wouldn’t have deployed the National Guard to subway hubs to perform bag searches or otherwise make city residents feel the martial law so strongly desired by former mayor Mike Bloomberg is one step closer to reality.
The MTA doesn’t appear to have any good ideas on how to beat back the fare jumpers (I mean, short of possibly literally beating them), but it still had an idea. “Can’t AI do it?” the MTA asked, without bothering to consult the public that would not only be subjected to it, but expected to pay for it.
While it is using AI as a “counting tool” to add up the total “lost” to fare jumping, it won’t be able to use another favorite tool of the “Can’t AI do it?” crowd, as Stephen Nessen reports for Gothamist.
Buried in the new state budget is one sentence with major implications for the future of MTA fare enforcement: a ban on the use of facial recognition.
The new law requires the MTA to “not use, or arrange for the use, of biometric identifying technology, including but not limited to facial recognition technology, to enforce rules relating to the payment of fares.”
State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani of Queens told Gothamist the measure was added to the budget to protect New Yorkers and their privacy.
“There has long been a concern [facial recognition] could invade upon people’s lives through expanded surveillance and through the criminalization of just existing within the public sphere,” Mamdani said.
Like every government budget bill everywhere, the New York state budget is a great place to hide law revisions you don’t want the public to discover until the bill has been passed. The same thing happened here, except this one somehow managed to benefit the public, rather than the MTA or the domestic surveillance hawks in the state legislature.
This MTA-targeting ban resulted in the MTA delivering a statement that was as unnecessary as it was empty and meaningless.
An MTA spokesperson said in a statement that the agency has never used facial recognition in its expanding surveillance system. The agency is in the midst of installing cameras in every subway station and some train cars.
Ok, then. So this changes nothing about the current state of affairs vis-à-vis MTA passenger surveillance. But it does change things about its future plans, which most likely included (prior to the passage of the budget bill) other options for policing fare jumping. And since the NYPD gets to use facial recognition, the MTA would not be out of line to assume it would enjoy the same privileges… unless something prevented it from doing so… which is what has happened here.
How long this will last is still up in the air. But, for now, the MTA will have to use less intrusive surveillance options to combat this “existential crisis.” Hopefully, if it asks for this moratorium to be lifted in the future, state leaders will at least allow the public to participate in the discussion, rather than hide a couple of lines in a must-pass budget bill.