Bias at the Door: The Case for Banning Facial Recognition in Residential Settings

To make this stronger, let's focus tightly on the legal analysis, which could use our attention. Your technical introduction is merely general: you can reduce it to a couple of sentences and links. Then we are able to ask harder legal questions. Facial recognition by software changes less at home than elsewhere, because where I live my face is recognized by all the human beings around me anyway, right? "Discrimination" is in need of careful definition in this context, given that once we are residents, tenants, etc., we are "discriminated" in the sense of being treated specially, not by virtue of some broad social stereotype, but by the nature of our legal relationship to the property, which is hardly in itself a reason for doubt or concern.

So, are we worried about the use of software to recognize guests or other invited persons? Tenant organizers or other persons moving around the property for reasons of which a landlord might disapprove but which are not unlawful or a violation of lease terms? To catch and control unlicensed short-term rentals? Which of these uses should be prohibited?

You do not discuss the difference between public and private landlords, which seems to be a significant legal omission, unless you are saying that there are no constitutional civil liberties issues specific to public housing, which would be a concession worth noting. You treat the Fair Housing Act as being, or aspiring to be, a general national bill of rights for private-market tenants, which I don't think the statutory text will bear; "should be amended" in that sense appears to mean, "should be rewritten for a new purpose," unless the question of error rates in recognition of non-white faces (which is a technological artifact, as we both see, changing with every software update and eventually disappearing) raises some more fundamental question than the ones the existing draft identifies.