Responding to Sen. Wyden's letter, the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development says it “doesn't monitor or track” usage of facial recognition in public housing
Alfred Ng / CNET : Tweets: @tonyajoriley , @jakelaperruque , @techledes , @hypervisible , @alfredwkng , and @alfredwkng Tweets: Tonya Riley / @tonyajoriley : “In a letter from HUD to Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, the agency explained that it doesn't know how many of its public housing programs use facial recognition or even how it's allowed to be used.” https://www.cnet.com/... @jakelaperruque : Time to pass the No Biometric Barriers to Housing Act led by @CoryBooker and @RepYvetteClarke, which will stop this tech from being used from public housing No one should have to worry that error-prone AI will call the cops on them for entering their own home https://twitter.com/... Connie Guglielmo / @techledes : Lawmakers want to regulate how facial recognition is being used, but there's a hitch. The Department of Housing & Urban Development doesn't track how the surveillance tech can be used on its approximately 1.2 million households. @alfredwkng reports. https://www.cnet.com/... Doomscrolling Eternal / @hypervisible : “It's obvious from this response that [HUD] has a lot of work to do to get a handle on whether facial recognition technology is being used on residents of public housing, who often have no choice in where they live or whether they will be subject to invasive surveillance...” https://twitter.com/... @alfredwkng : Shot: HUD funding does not cover buying facial recognition. Chaser: HUD doesn't require managers to disclose if their federally-funded cameras are mixed with facial recognition software. https://www.cnet.com/... https://twitter.com/... @alfredwkng : NEW: HUD admits that it doesn't keep track of how many public housing programs use facial recognition, and has never looked into research about racial bias or policies it can put in place to safeguard abuses https://www.cnet.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Sen. Ron Wyden asked HUD a simple oversight question — how widely is facial recognition used in the public housing it funds? — and got an answer that is itself the story: the agency doesn't monitor or track usage, doesn't require managers to disclose it, and has never reviewed bias research or safeguards. That gap is not abstract: a later investigation found some housing agencies using surveillance cameras with facial recognition to evict residents, sometimes for minor violations.
The letter lands mid-campaign: activists in Detroit, the US city with the highest percentage of Black residents, were already pushing to end the city's facial recognition use ahead of a key contract renewal. Wyden's exchange gives those local fights a federal data point — the funder of public housing admits it cannot say where the technology is deployed or how.
First-order effects
- Public housing residents and their advocates are left with no federal source of truth: HUD's non-tracking means neither Congress nor tenants can currently learn where federally funded cameras use facial recognition or under what rules.
- Wyden's letter hands ammunition to the No Biometric Barriers to Housing Act push led by Cory Booker and Yvette Clarke, which would bar the technology from public housing outright — an admission of zero oversight strengthens the case for a ban over disclosure rules.
Second-order effects
- Local campaigns like Detroit's shift from asking cities to justify contracts to asking why HUD funds them at all, raising pressure on housing agencies to disclose camera capabilities or face activist and congressional scrutiny.
- Vendors selling biometric-enabled surveillance into public housing now face a market where a single federal statute or a handful of city bans could close their public-sector housing channel, pushing them toward voluntary disclosure to preempt it.
Third-order effects
- The pattern repeats the one civil rights groups flagged when cities adopted Amazon's Rekognition without public debate: biometric surveillance spreads through procurement faster than any agency tracks it, leaving FOIA requests and letters from individual senators as the only audit mechanism.
- If HUD's blind spot proves structural rather than incidental, expect federal oversight of biometrics in housing to move from agency self-reporting to legislation or disclosure mandates — with the eviction findings suggesting the stakes extend from privacy to due process for tenants.
The trend: Biometric surveillance is diffusing into government-provided services like housing faster than the agencies funding it can track, regulate, or disclose it.