Kansas City Pushes for Facial Recognition on Public Buses

Kansas City, Missouri is gearing up to equip public buses with facial recognition cameras designed to detect if a rider is on a list of banned or missing people.

There's been a huge push across the U.S. for surveillance cameras to be installed all over the place, the most famous being the Flock cameras that have been shown time and again to be highly insecure and repeatedly get innocent people arrested.

There's an equally huge pushback from the public, with many cities canceling their contracts with Flock.

Putting facial recognition cameras in public transportation that many people need to use to get around seems particularly diabolical though. It would allow SafeSpace, the company running these particular surveillance cameras, to track everywhere someone goes throughout their day.

SafeSpace Global previously used their facial recognition cameras to track if nursing home residents left the building, and then moved to prisons and schools.

This perfectly follows what Cory Doctorow calls the "Shitty Technology Adoption Curve," with the most marginalized members of society getting it first before it rolls out to everyone else.

SafeSpace claims that if no match is detected, the facial recognition data won't be retained. However, as we saw with Flock which had images from all the way back in the factory stored on it, claims are not always reality.

Even if what they claim is true, in all likelihood the security of these cameras is not the best. If hackers have half as easy a time infiltrating these as they did with Flock cameras, your facial recognition data is essentially forfeit.

The facial recognition in these systems is still extremely flawed as well. False arrests have run rampant from day one of facial recognition tech being used and it still continues to this day.

Grandmas getting falsely arrested because cops blindly trust facial recognition is not acceptable.

The project has been delayed due to the need to upgrade the onboard routers to support the new cameras, and because state funding fell through.

Tyler Means, chief mobility and strategy officer at the Kansas City Transportation Authority, says that despite the delays, the program will launch this year and be significantly expanded to 30 buses instead of the originally planned 9.

Boruff, the CEO of SafeSpace Global, says that they're ready to install the cameras as soon as funding comes through. The process should take around 3-4 months.