LAKELAND, Fla. — Lakeland’s Downtown Development Authority has done an about-face when it comes to using facial recognition software in its new downtown security cameras.
It’s a feature that had not been discussed when the new cameras were brought online a couple of months ago.
But after gaining the attention of civil liberties organizations, the city is disabling the feature.
Most people downtown seemed to agree there's no expectation of privacy and that the camera system could help prevent crime. But when it was learned that those cameras were scanning everyone and saving that data for up to a month, it raised concerns.
“It definitely is too far,” Justin Kight said while visiting Lakeland’s downtown. “People want to just relax out here and with them knowing that it's facial recognition it's absurd.”
The city originally enabled the software feature, telling people they had nothing to be worried about when it came to recording the data.
“You know, after 30 days it's gone. If you're not doing anything, you shouldn't be concerned,” Lakeland’s Clean and Safe Manager Tony DaVilla said.
However, that's not the way the American Civil Liberties Union sees it.
Within days, the ACLU released a statement saying, in part, “Real-time face surveillance poses a massive threat to our civil rights and civil liberties… Other cities have been unwilling to deploy it, and Lakeland should reverse course immediately."
Some say they can see the potential upside to using the feature as a law enforcement tool, but question at what cost.
“There might be a little bit of a safety issue,” visitor Rodney Probasco said. “But it destroys our freedom.”
“Surveillance, in general, is OK, because that's how you know if something happened, you can go back and understand what happened,” Lakeland visitor Jeremy Thorson said. “But in terms of capturing and storing that data, and using it through facial recognition and things, like that, that's where things get a little dicey for me.”
The LDDA, which also got pushback from at least one city commissioner, now says it will no longer be utilizing the facial recognition feature.
The organization didn't say when it turned off the software, but in a statement, it cited threats of legal action as the reason.
“The harmful effects of pointless litigation that the LDDA cannot afford outweigh the small benefits that facial recognition would have provided,” the organization posted online.
“That's a good thing,” downtown visitor Chuck Borden said. “I think because they're starting to invade people’s privacy and stuff. Which is not good.”
The Downtown Development Authority says at one point it had loaded three photographs into the system as people of interest. Those photos, they say, have now been removed.
In all, the city of Lakeland has 13 of the cameras in its downtown surveillance network.
Although they say the facial recognition feature has been disabled, the cameras, are still functioning and continue to collect video images that can be stored for up to a month.