New York City backs a biometric-recognition ban

New York City’s administration and 28 of 51 council members now back a bill that would bar businesses open to the public from using facial, iris, voice, fingerprint, or gait recognition to identify customers, while allowing up to $5,000 for each intentional or reckless violation. The city’s bill text also requires advance written consent for collection, security safeguards, deletion on request, and a retention schedule; Gothamist’s report says Council Speaker Julie Menin has not yet endorsed it. For builders deploying privacy controls around AI systems, the signal is that customer-facing biometric inference is becoming a local-law deployment constraint, not merely a model-policy choice.