City Council members said renewed concerns about the safety of biometric data in the face of cyberattacks make passing the laws all the more urgent.

STATESCOOP — By Keely Quinlan

The New York City Council considered two pieces of legislation during an oversight hearing on Monday that would ban businesses like music venues, theaters and supermarkets from using biometric recognition technology to identify customers, and ban the tech in residential buildings.

The proposed local laws are reiterations of bills heard by the council’s Committee on Technology last year that would have also put restrictions on the use of biometric surveillance and data collection across the city. But Council Member Shahana Hanif, the prime sponsor of the legislation to ban businesses from using the tech, said renewed concerns — including the impact of collecting biometric data, the security stored data and the role of the city’s Cyber Command and Office of Technology and Innovation in leading that effort — make passing the laws all the more urgent.

“Since this bill was heard last session, there have been countless developments that have made this the passage of this bill more urgent than ever, including wrongful arrests and data leaks — but the event that stands out the most to me is the Federal Trade Commission’s finding in December that the pharmacy chain RiteAid used facial recognition technology to falsely and disproportionately identify thousands of people of color and women as likely shoplifters, including those right here in New York City,” Hanif said during the hearing [Read More].