As enthusiasm for technological advancement has ushered in an exciting era of unprecedented innovation, technologists, scholars, privacy rights advocates and members of the public are raising concerns about the efficacy of facial recognition software and its uses in the future. Increasingly, the media news cycle is full of stories about the ways tech companies and government institutions are deploying facial recognition technology to the detriment of the public’s constitutional rights and statutory rights to privacy. In an era of unprecedented digital innovation, has the emergence of facial recognition technology proven that surveillance technology has finally gone too far? This conference will explore the encompassing regulatory, legal and human implications in facial recognition technology. EFF's Surveillance Litigation Director, Jennifer Lynch, will be speaking. 

As Surveillance Litigation Director, Jennifer  Lynch  leads EFF’s legal work challenging government abuse of search and seizure technologies through the courts by filing  impact lawsuits and amicus briefs in federal and state courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. Jennifer founded EFF’s  Street Level Surveillance  Project, which informs advocates, defense attorneys, and decisionmakers about new police tools, and in 2017, the  First Amendment Coalition  awarded her its  Free Speech and Open Government Award  for her work opening up public access to police surveillance records. Jennifer has written influential white papers on  biometric data collection in immigrant communities  and  law enforcement use of face recognition. She speaks frequently at legal and technical conferences as well as to the general public on technologies like location tracking, biometrics, algorithmic decisionmaking, and AI, and has testified on facial recognition before committees in the  Senate  and  House of Representatives. She is regularly consulted as an expert on these subjects and others by major and technical news media.