Racing to escape the rain, I reached my building in the Bronx and positioned my face in front of the facial recognition entrance system. Despite multiple attempts, the screen repeatedly failed to identify me. As a Black woman, I had experienced the inconvenience of the system taking longer to recognize me than it did for lighter-skinned individuals. But stuck outside alone at night, this was the first time I truly felt endangered by this technology and felt aware of the omnipresent surveillance in my neighborhood. This experience forced me to confront the disturbing realities of how much personal biometric data I was relinquishing, who was accessing it, and the inefficacy of a system that barred me from my own home.

Across New York, countless tenants with landlord-installed facial recognition share these concerns about surveillance and racial discrimination. The prevalence of facial recognition technology in residential buildings not only infringes on personal privacy and puts tenants’ biometric data at risk, but it also exhibits racial biases against overpoliced Black and Brown communities. It is imperative New York State legislators ban its use this session to ensure the safety, privacy, and dignity of all New Yorkers in their homes.

Surveillance is especially prevalent in public housing. According to the Washington Post, there is one camera in New York City public housing for every 19 residents, comparable to one for every 20 visitors to the Louvre in Paris. This level of surveillance saturation goes hand in hand with the extreme gentrification occurring in Brooklyn and Manhattan, but also beyond the city, in places like Yonkers and Buffalo. Adding facial recognition technology to their surveillance arsenal is part of landlords’ efforts to attract wealthier, predominantly white tenants to these neighborhoods, making them feel safer, while closely monitoring current, mainly Black and Latinx public housing residents. This increases the likelihood of these tenants being punished or evicted for minor rule violations, including when misidentified. 

The NYPD can access surveillance footage through its dystopian Domain Awareness System (DAS), which consolidates private and public camera feeds and intelligence data, regardless of its origin. This system includes video footage from cameras around the city, including in residential buildings, infringing upon the freedom of residents, particularly Black and Latinx communities who are already disproportionately targeted by discriminatory policing. With the NYPD’s track record of using facial recognition technology against children, who are more prone to misidentification by the technology, it comes as no surprise that residents feel threatened at the idea of the police having access to their biometric data and movements without consent. 

Tania Acabou, a single mother from New Bedford, Massachusetts, found herself evicted on the grounds that she had violated a guest policy, as determined by the facial recognition camera, when the “guest” was her ex-husband providing childcare so that she could attend school. New Yorkers, threatened by similar actions, have resisted non-consensual installation of these systems by landlords. In 2019, residents of Atlantic Plaza Towers in Brooklyn organized against the implementation of facial recognition technology that forced them to surrender their biometric information. The power these systems give to landlords is boundless, forcing tenants to grant access to their biometric data to third parties with no security assurances. 

Protests by community members have successfully led to the introduction of a bill in the New York State legislature which prohibits the use of facial recognition by landlords on any residential premises. To protect New York residents from the threat of being tracked by landlords and not having control over their data, this bill needs to be advanced to the Assembly and Senate floors for voting. At a time when protecting the rights and privacy of New Yorkers is paramount, legislative intervention is more crucial than ever to prevent discrimination and safeguard the homes of residents. 

Renwick-Archibold is a Research Intern at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) and a 2024 graduate of Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in computer science and cognitive neuroscience.

The post OP-ED: Facial recognition locked me out of my own apartment. NYS must ban it. appeared first on New York Amsterdam News.

* This article was originally published here

It’s been a busy few months for the Boris & Horton team. In February of this year, New York City’s first dog-friendly cafe chainlet—which has locations in Manhattan (at 195 Avenue A in the East Village) and Brooklyn (510 Driggs Ave in Williamsburg)—successfully fundraised $250,000 to keep the sweet concept open and running.

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However, it looks like even a quarter of a million wasn’t enough, as father-daughter owners Logan Mikhly and Coppy Holzman recently announced on social media that the year-old Brooklyn outpost would sadly be shuttering for real by the end of May. (The East Village original will, for now, continue to operate.)

“After much consideration and evaluation, we’ve made the difficult decision to close our Brooklyn location at the end of this month,” read the team’s closing announcement, which was posted to Instagram on Tuesday, May 21. “We know that many of you donated in the hopes of keeping Brooklyn open, and we are heartbroken to let you down. This was not a decision we made lightly. We tried partnering with other local businesses, hiring an events manager, adding more programming, and other ways to bring in foot traffic, but despite our best efforts, sales have just been too weak to support the store.”

While the owners acknowledged that they will “miss all of our regulars in Brooklyn and all of the amazing artists and brands that teamed up with us over the last year,” the closure of the Williamsburg cafe means that the Boris & Horton team can “devote all of our resources to keeping our East Village location healthy and sustainable.” Despite initially believing earlier this year that they’d also have to shut the Manhattan location, “we’re happy to share that the East Village store has been doing well lately, thanks in large part to the incredible support from all of you and the new initiatives we’ve rolled out,” Mikhly and Holzman added. 

So while it is a shame that Brooklyn-based doggos will now have to go elsewhere for their pup cups, at least NYC won’t be fully missing Boris & Horton after all. 

* This article was originally published here

Although it has been open since February of 2023, we just found out about a cookie pick-up window operated by the phenomenal Levain Bakery in Astoria and we must share it with the world.

Found adjacent to the company’s cookie commissary at 9-20 35th Avenue in Queens, the destination serves freshly made treats available for pick-up or delivery through third-party apps like DoorDash, UberEats and GrubHub.

There are seven cookies on the menu here: chocolate chip walnut, dark chocolate chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, dark chocolate peanut butter chip, two chip chocolate chip, vegan and gluten-free chocolate chip walnut and caramel coconut chocolate chip. 

Drink-wise, you can opt for regular milk, chocolate milk, bottled flat or sparkling water.

Just in case you need a touch of java with your sweet fix, though, you can also purchase Devocion coffee beans (an excellent choice) here and just head home to make yourself a nice cup.

While at it: grab one of the tote bags on sale—Levain Bakery is a quintessential New York business, after all, and walking around with one will obviously give you street cred.

Although the Astoria pick-up window is the only one of its kind in NYC, Levain Bakery, voted the most popular bakery in the U.S. just last year, operates a total of seven more traditional brick-and-mortar shops around the city, including the company’s original location on West 74th Street and a brand-new address in the Flatiron District at 2 West 18th Street by Fifth Avenue.

The bakery has come a long way, fully embodying the sort of trajectory that New York businesses have always hoped to achieve.

As fans of the now-iconic chain know, co-founders Pam Weekes and Connie McDonald started baking six-ounce cookies made with simple, high-quality ingredients as a post-race treat when they were training for triathlons. They began selling the dessert and, after noticing how quickly they would sell out, decided to open a small bread shop on West 74th Street in 1995. Fast-forward nearly three decades and here we are today, chatting about a dessert empire. 

* This article was originally published here