BY ROSE ADAMS
A Park Slope lawmaker wants
to rein in landlords from using
facial recognition technology
to track tenants.
City Councilman Brad
Lander (D–Park Slope) introduced
the Keep Entry to Your
home Surveillance-Free Act —
which he’s branded the KEYS
Act, not the KEYHSF Act —
that would give tenants the
option to demand traditional
locks instead of “smart keys”
that rely on facial scanners
and smartphone apps, which
he claims could be used to
track tenants movements and
collect their personal data.
According to Lander, unscrupulous
landlords have
used the data to accuse tenants
of violating their lease
and threaten them with eviction.
“Clearly, some landlords
are trying to build cases
against their tenants,” said
the Councilman. “You might
be letting someone stay with
you, and they might think that
was an AirBnB tenant.”
COURIER L 48 IFE, OCT. 18-24, 2019
The complaints against the
“smart” locks fi rst surfaced in
May, when over 130 rent-stabilized
tenants claimed that
their Brownsville buildings’
facial scanners allowed their
landlords to keep tabs on their
comings and goings.
Others have argued that facial
recognition tends to misidentify
people of color, and
that smartphone-activated
key apps are not accessible
to older, less-tech-savvy residents.
In one case, an elderly man
in Manhattan fi led a lawsuit
against his landlord after he
was locked out of his apartment
building, where his landlord
had installed Latch — a
lock accessible via phone app.
However, smart key companies
have argued that the
backlash against them is
rooted in misunderstanding.
Latch locks, for example,
can also be opened with a key
card or a code in addition to a
phone app, and a spokeswoman
for SmartLock — the facial
scanning technology employed
by the Brownsville apartment
towers — argued that the scanner
doesn’t “track” users or
take photos of their faces.
“How the user looks is not
known or tracked,” said a
spokeswoman for the company.
Additionally, facial recognition
increases safety because
physical keys — unlike
faces — can be lost or stolen,
argued the spokeswoman.
“There is no need for a
physical key, which only signifi
cantly weakens security
and creates opportunities for
lost, stolen or misplaced keys
to be used by unauthorized
individuals to easily gain access,”
she said.
Councilman Brad Lander — pictured here with wife Meg Barnette, and
gadgets — proposed a bill that will prevent landlords from installing facial
recognition techonology without their tenants’ consent.
Photo by Stefano Giovannini
FACE OFF Lander introduces anti-facial-recognition bill