GAO warns of privacy risks in using facial recognition in rental housing

What about risks from facial recognition in airports? I’m shocked how everyone just says yes and does the scan. That is going to normalize facial recognition everywhere else including rental housing.

How much privacy did you have in an airport to begin with? You gave your identity to the airline when you bought a ticket, and the airline passed that on to the government. You can't fly anonymously and, as far back as I can remember, never could. Even without cameras, you need a ticket to get past security, so everyone airside has already been identified. If it's an international flight, you already gave some government a biometric-friendly photograph with your passport application.

When you rent housing, your landlord is likely to require some identification for a credit check. Your face isn't going to make a difference here, because you already handed him your ID. Where it might make a difference is internal security camera footage: if you let your significant other live with you without paying rent, the landlord will know because her face will be recognized. If you sublet without notifying the landlord, he'll know. If you're running a flophouse or drug den, he'll know. But he already knew who you were before you signed a lease, because ID is more than a face.

You had more than you think. The airport stuff gives the feds and police a high trust indexed representation of your face that will be used in all sorts of contexts in the future.

In 2025, when DOGE agents casually committed multiple felonies by exfiltrating sensitive data to god knows who, that should be really disturbing to you. Although, you see to be casually ok with some goomba landlord maintaining a dossier on anyone entering your apartment, so I guess it would be.

> Although, you see to be casually ok with some goomba landlord maintaining a dossier on anyone entering your apartment, so I guess it would be.

That might be because the goomba landlord is trying to rent you something while DOGE is part of our government who deported US citizens, completely against their own laws, to be imprisoned in a private prison, without trial, without access to family.

Therefore the goomba landlord is a small annoyance that can evolve into a small problem, and the other ...

The problem is always the same: governments see themselves as above the rules. This is why facial recognition was a big deal in the UK, until the police started to violate on a very large scale what people THOUGHT were the rules they voted in. They had failed to notice the "and violations will be checked by an independent board, so independent it's controlled by the same people controlling the police" part of the law. The government had granted itself, retroactively, without involving parliament, "an exception" (exception that covers like 98% of all facial recognition cameras in the UK) and implemented it on a large scale. PLUS from the locations and view of the cameras it is very obvious the goal is to clamp down on protests, not to stop crime.

The private entities share the data willy nilly. You can do near realtime tracking of cars now with the LPRs mounted on tow trucks, parking garages, etc. Landlords are already engaged in scaled abuses through scaled blacklists and price fixing.

Abuse of this technology is a pox on society. But don't assume that only the government has the ability to abuse.