We became booksellers for a simple reason: We love books and we wanted to share this love with our neighbors in Portland. Our business model relies on building relationships, building trust and sharing knowledge. It does not rely on invading our customers’ privacy.
The proposal before the Maine Legislature requires companies to get consent before they collect biometric identifiers such as facial features, voices and fingerprints. It would also ban companies from selling biometric data and set rules about how long they are able to keep it. HQuality/Shutterstock.com
In recent months, tech companies and other big out-of-state companies like Amazon, Google and Meta (formerly Facebook) have swarmed our state capitol trying to defeat a bill that would regulate corporations’ collection, use and sale of our personal, unchangeable biological characteristics – our fingerprints, our faces, the sound of our voices. These big tech companies claim that this legislation would hurt Maine’s thriving business community.
As small-business owners in Maine, we’d like to wholeheartedly disagree. In fact, we believe that passing L.D. 1945, An Act To Regulate the Use of Biometric Identifiers, is a crucial step toward protecting all of our privacy.
Companies like our independent bookstore don’t rely on selling your most private information to make our bottom line. Big Tech, on the other hand, is notorious for collecting our data, analyzing it and selling it. It’s baked into their business model – they charge you for a service and make money from you by selling your biometric identifiers, like your face. The secretive surveillance company Clearview AI, for example, has boasted about creating “the world’s largest facial network,” made up of billions of our literal faceprints that they’ve scraped from all over the internet without our permission. Their database is so large, federal lawmakers are worried it could effectively eliminate the notion of public anonymity if left unchecked.
And that’s why this legislation is so important. If passed, L.D. 1945 would protect Mainers’ right to privacy by creating guardrails on how companies can collect and use our personal biometric identifiers. Think about how terrifying it is when you get a notification alerting you someone stole your login information. With biometric identifiers, the consequences are even more permanent. Unlike a credit card or even a Social Security number, your biometric data can’t be revoked or reissued. That is why we need strong legal protections for this highly sensitive information.
From creating a new tool for abusers to stalk their victims to wrongful arrests to arbitrary exclusion from businesses, these technologies are a danger to all of our core constitutional rights, but we are particularly worried about the serious threat these technologies pose to Mainers of color and members of other marginalized groups. For example, a 2019 federal study of facial recognition systems found that Asian and Black people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men, depending on the particular algorithm and type of search. Native Americans had the highest false-positive rate of all ethnicities. Women were also more likely to be falsely identified than men, and older people and children were more likely to be misidentified than those in other age groups.
The proposal before the Maine Legislature requires companies to get consent before they collect biometric identifiers such as facial features, voices and fingerprints. It would also ban companies from selling biometric data and set rules about how long they are able to keep it. This bill ensures that everyone in Maine has control and autonomy over their biometric identifiers.
Every time a customer comes into our bookstore, we see it as our responsibility to make sure they are well taken care of and safe. We also see it as our responsibility to respect their privacy. It should go without saying that we feel the same way about their biometric identifiers. We’ve had enough of huge corporations using small businesses as an excuse to put their profits over our privacy. Stronger protections for our most personal information is something all Mainers can and must agree on.
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