A look at a proposed Massachusetts bill that would let state police use face recognition for image matching, but not face surveillance or emotion recognition
A Massachusetts bill restricting police use could set the standard for how the technology is regulated in America. Mastodon: @aregenberg@mastodon.online . Twitter: @torrhl and @kjaerulv . Forums: r/privacy Mastodon: Alan Regenberg / @aregenberg@mastodon.online : Face recognition in the US is about to meet one of its biggest tests | MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... Twitter: @torrhl : “Face recognition in the US is about to meet one of its biggest tests - A Massachusetts bill restricting police use could set the standard for how the technology is regulated in America. If it fails, it'll be a blow to a once-promising movement.” https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... Anders Kjærulff / @kjaerulv : “Hoan Ton-That, CEO of Clearview, told the commission in his written testimony that “Clearview AI's bias-free algorithm can accurately find any face out of over 3 billion images it has collected from the public internet.” https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... Forums: r/privacy : The movement to limit face recognition tech might finally get a win
Context & Ripple Effects
Massachusetts is revisiting ground it staked out two years ago: after ACLU organizer Kade Crockford helped push through a 2021 police reform bill banning facial recognition in criminal cases, the new proposal softens the line rather than holding it — permitting state police to run image matching while explicitly prohibiting face surveillance and emotion recognition.
The stakes go beyond one state. Coverage since at least the 2019 overview of how US law enforcement uses facial recognition has documented an unregulated patchwork, and vendors like Clearview — whose CEO testified its algorithm can search over 3 billion scraped images — operate nationally. A bill framed as setting the American standard matters because no federal framework has arrived.
First-order effects
- State police gain a legally defined lane for face recognition searches, while uses outside it — continuous surveillance and emotion inference — become prohibited rather than merely contested.
Second-order effects
- Vendors such as Clearview must shape products and sales pitches around whatever 'image matching' is deemed permissible, and other states facing similar activist pressure get a ready-made compromise template short of a full ban.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US face-recognition policy consolidates around state-level statutes drawing a matching-versus-surveillance line, leaving the federal push once floated by Microsoft and Amazon unrealized and enforcement fragmented by jurisdiction.
The trend: In the absence of federal action, individual states are becoming the de facto regulators of biometric policing, trading outright bans for narrowly scoped permitted uses.