The Facial Recognition System That Launched a Thousand Evictions

Your landlord is watching you come and go – and it isn't to say hello

Writing in Albany’s Times Union, Fabian Rogers and Jason Taper of privacy watchdog STOP remind us that invasive landlords are nothing new. What is new is the way facial recognition has quietly become a tool for controlling tenants.

Landlords, for obvious reasons, don’t like rent-stabilization policies in many cities. Knowing this, technology firms are now marketing facial recognition products as a way to help landlords find new ways to evict people and raise rents (because, to de-regulate an apartment, you first have to empty it). There’s even a wink-wink industry term for this: “de-stabilize.”
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It’s a technological fishing expedition, and facial recognition tech is the rod. Park a camera at the only door, log every entry and departure, and wait to “catch” a tenant in violation of some technicality – an unauthorized overnight guest or a too-frequent absence that “proves” they don't really live there.

Landlords will use all manner of red herring arguments to whitewash what they’re doing, such as claims of enhanced “safety and security.” In co-author Rogers’ own case, his Brooklyn landlord decided to implement a facial recognition system a mere year after the complex was declared rent-stabilized. Coincidence? The Trojan Horse pitch the landlord used was “frictionless entry.”

Rogers and his fellow tenants weren’t fooled. After they organized, the landlord backed down. In the end, the tenants’ right to privacy trumped the promise of frictionless entry.

This is just one example of how private companies are quietly assembling exactly the kind of always-on surveillance the Constitution forbids the government from building – and that is the loophole. The Fourth Amendment guards your home against the state; it has nothing to say about a property manager with a camera.
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New York's Senate Bill S8223 would ban landlords from using such tech. This makes sense: No one should have to build a tenant movement simply to preserve the basic freedom to come home without being tracked, watched, and cataloged by the place they live.

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