https://www.wired.com/story/california-bill-halt-facial-recognition-body-cams/

Last month, members of the California legislature were subject to a surveillance experiment, courtesy of the American Civil Liberties Union. Their portraits were fed into Amazon’s Rekognition facial recognition software and compared with a database of 25,000 arrest mug shots. Twenty-six lawmakers were incorrectly identified as matches. The would-be suspects included Assemblyman Phil Ting, a Democrat from San Francisco. He hoped it would drum up support for his bill, AB 1215, to ban facial recognition from police body cameras.

On Wednesday, the state senate passed a slightly different bill—not a ban but a moratorium that expires in three years. The change came just ahead of the deadline to make amendments before the session ends this week. Some privacy advocates worry that the bill’s expiration date will give companies, many of which acknowledge the limitations of their technology, time to improve their algorithms and win over skeptics. In three years, if the ACLU’s test is replayed, will the facial recognition companies pass it?