Center on Privacy and Technology
| Formation | 2014 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Alvaro Bedoya |
| Type | Policy think tank |
| Location | |
Director | Emily Tucker |
Parent organization | Georgetown University Law Center |
| Website | www |
The Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology is a think tank at Georgetown University in Washington, DC dedicated to the study of privacy and technology. Established in 2014, it is housed within the Georgetown University Law Center.[1] The goal of the Center is to conduct research and empower legal and legislative advocacy around issues of privacy and surveillance, with a focus on how such issues affect groups of different social class and race.[2] In May 2022, the Center's founding director Alvaro Bedoya was confirmed as a commissioner of the United States Federal Trade Commission.[3]
Activities
[edit]Surveillance
[edit]From 2016 to 2019, the Center hosted an annual conference titled "The Color of Surveillance" which explored how government and technological surveillance affected different marginalized populations, including Black Americans, immigrants to the United States, religious minorities, and poor and working people.[4]
Facial recognition
[edit]The Center has collaborated with many advocacy organizations, including the ACLU, the Algorithmic Justice League, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as part of campaigns raising awareness about the use of facial recognition by the government. In 2016, the Center published a report called The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America which documents the widespread unregulated use of facial recognition by law enforcement across the United States.[5][6] In 2018, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Center against the New York Police Department revealed that facial recognition scans were being run on mugshots of every arrestee.[7] A subsequent report in 2019, "Garbage In, Garbage Out: Face Recognition on Flawed Data" documented multiple cases of police departments attempting to identify suspects using hand-drawn sketches, highly edited photos, and photos of celebrity lookalikes.[8][9]
References
[edit]- ^ Ho, Catherine (11 January 2015). "Georgetown Law, MIT team up to tackle topic of privacy in the age of big data". Washington Post. Retrieved 12 September 2021.
- ^ "Center on Privacy and Technology". www.law.georgetown.edu. Retrieved 12 March 2021.
- ^ "U.S. Senate: U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 117th Congress - 2nd Session". www.senate.gov. 11 May 2022. Retrieved 29 November 2022.
- ^ "The Color of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of the African American Community". www.law.georgetown.edu. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
- ^ "The Perpetual Line-Up". Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law. Archived from the original on 2016-10-18. Retrieved 2021-09-18.
- ^ Williams, Patricia J. (7 November 2016). "Americans Are Finding New Ways to Join the Surveillance State". The Nation. Retrieved 13 March 2021.
- ^ Brown, Stephen Rex (1 March 2018). "NYPD ripped for abusing facial-recognition tool". NY Daily News. Retrieved 12 September 2021.
- ^ "Garbage In. Garbage Out. Face Recognition on Flawed Data". Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law. Archived from the original on 2019-05-16. Retrieved 2021-09-18.
- ^ Ng, Alfred. "Police are using flawed data in facial recognition searches, study finds". CNET. Retrieved 13 March 2021.
