Facial recognition technology will make abortion access more dangerous
Since I began volunteering as an escort last summer, I’ve come to believe that there is no behavior so obscene as to be beneath the people who protest at abortion clinics. I’ve seen protesters dress up in medical scrubs and cover themselves in red paint to resemble blood. One time I chased a protester out of a tree that hung over the clinic parking lot as he attempted to peek into the dumpster to find mutilated baby parts. At the end of one of my shifts, a man harangued and taunted me as I walked to my car. Most recently, one protester repeatedly called me a racist Nazi who’s ushering in the end the Black race whenever I escorted Black patients from their cars to the clinic door. None of these things are strictly illegal, and seasoned protesters typically know the law well enough not to break it. They can, after all, get away with a hell of a lot already.
Occasionally, a protester will cross the line, and clinic staff will call the police. But at my clinic, the police and protesters are on friendly terms. They wave and smile at the protesters from their patrol cars as they drive by. When they are respond to a call from the clinic, they get out and shake hands with the protesters. Some are on a first-name basis with the cops. During my last shift, a cop pulled over next to the sidewalk for a friendly chat with the protesters, one of whom turned to me and smugly said, “See? Even the law is on our side.” He’s wrong, of course, because the right to abortion is enshrined in the Constitution, but I understand his point: the police is on his side, not ours.
When police respond so warmly to the protesters, they are telling the protesters that their behavior won’t be punished. But what we fear most is if or when the pro-choice friendly police officers start to take a more active role in the movement. The police are privy to all sorts of private information that protesters aren’t; they could run the license plates of clinic staff, escorts, and patients from the parking lot and give that information to the protesters. The inappropriate depth to which law enforcement is integrated into the rabid anti-choice movement is extremely unsettling, and that’s why the new facial recognition app from the Australian start up Clearview AI has such terrifying potential. This technology could serve up our identities and personal information in seconds, putting us at risk for more targeted harassment and violence.
According to a recent report in The New York Times, Clearview’s facial recognition app allows law enforcement to snap a photo, upload it, and access public photos of that person and the photos’ origin. Their database includes millions of sites, including Facebook, YouTube, and Venmo. With an uncharacteristic level of restraint, many tech companies have been reticent to release such technology because of its potential use for mass surveillance. As the Times says, Clearview’s database is unprecedented, exceeding anything either Silicon Valley or the U.S. government has created. The app is currently used only by law enforcement (Clearview won’t disclose the names of the 600 law enforcement agencies using it), but both investors and law enforcement foresee the app going public in the future.
Science and technology scholars and criminal justice reform advocates have long sounded the alarm on the dangers of facial recognition AI in law enforcement. Racial and gender biases are already baked into facial recognition algorithms, consistently misidentifying Black people and women, particularly Black women. On average, these algorithms serve up the most accurate results for middle-aged white men, mirroring the image of their main creators. This technological dystopia has been designed especially for people of color and women.
It’s not uncommon for protesters to whip out their phones to film and snap photos of escorts and patients. (I don’t actually know what they do with those videos and photos; I’ve never looked, partly out of fear of finding out to what use my visage is being put). We can’t avoid this, but we do go to great lengths to conceal personal information about ourselves. Many of us use nicknames while we work, and if possible, we arrive before and leave after the protesters do so they can’t identify our cars. In the hands of clinic protesters and their law enforcement friends, Clearview would become another tool they can use to harass clinic staff, escorts, and patients. If discovering our names and where we live is as easy as uploading a photo of us, then none of our precautions matter anymore.
Our fears and safety measures are not a mere matter of paranoia; violence against abortion clinics has reached an all-time high. And the number of protesters increased by more than 20,000 between 2017 and 2018. On any given day at my clinic, the number of protesters far exceeds that of escorts. Clinic staff, escorts, and patients rely on anonymity to provide some level of protection that allows us to leave the harassment and threat of violence behind when we leave the clinic. But when that anonymity is gone, the risk of targeted violence that follows us to our homes and workplaces escalates. Even if this app isn’t yet in the hands of the public, the friendly law enforcement could very possibly oblige the protesters.
Image credit: Clinic escort wearing a pink “Pro-choice clinic escort” vest. Photo by Lorie Shaull. (Flickr | CC BY-SA 2.0)
