S.F. transit agency seeks face-detecting cameras to check streets

San Francisco’s public transit agency plans to purchase up to 150 cameras marketed for their ability to find and focus on human faces, although city officials insist the devices will monitor only traffic — not people.

The Municipal Transportation Agency is seeking a vendor that will sell cameras equipped with “face detection” technology, according to bidding documents posted online.

The planned purchase is meant to upgrade the major thoroughfares around the city’s Van Ness Avenue Bus Rapid Transit project, which will be done sometime in 2019, said Paul Rose, a spokesman for the transportation agency.

The Samsung Techwin security cameras that the agency is seeking can detect multiple faces at a time, notice changes in scenery and alert viewers when people cross a designated line, according to company marketing materials.

The term “face detection” appeared in the bid only because it’s common for the agency to list all the specifications of a product it hopes to obtain when it alerts companies that the city is in the market.

The cameras, which will be purchased as part of the city’s SF Go traffic improvement program, will be used to make real-time adjustments to traffic signals along city streets, Rose said.

Employees will be able to pull up video feeds to monitor specific intersections when the cameras are installed after hearing about reports of, say, an accident, Rose said.

Although the cameras themselves are sophisticated enough to track specific individuals as they move through the city, the transportation agency lacks the software needed to perform such facial recognition, Rose said.

The potential for abuse still worries privacy advocates, who fear the cameras could easily be converted into a surveillance tool.

“These cameras would be trained on traffic, potentially picking up license plate data, which would allow for location tracking from law enforcement and others,” said Rebecca Jeschke, a digital rights analyst and media relations director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Just because the agency said it will not retain camera footage doesn’t mean that digital forensics experts couldn’t seek a judge’s permission to retrieve the data if they felt it was necessary, said Davi Ottenheimer, a security consultant who runs the San Francisco firm Flyingpenguin.