If a local tech industry critic has his way, San Francisco could become the first US city to ban its agencies from using facial recognition technology. Aaron Peskin, a member of the city's Board of Supervisors, proposed the ban Tuesday as part of a suite of rules to enhance surveillance oversight. In addition to the ban on facial recognition technology, the ordinance would require city agencies to gain the board's approval before buying new surveillance technology, putting the burden on city agencies to publicly explain why they want the tools as well as the potential harms. It would also require an audit of any existing surveillance tech--things like gunshot-detection systems, surveillance cameras, or automatic license plate readers--in use by the city; officials would have to report annually on how the technology was used, community complaints, and with whom they share the data. Those rules would follow similar ordinances passed in nearby Oakland and Santa Clara County.

It was only a matter of time. In what appears to be a milestone in the Internet of things era, police have asked Amazon for data that may have been recorded on its Echo device while a murder was taking place. As the Information reports (paywall), a man named Victor Collins died sometime during the night of November 21, 2015, while visiting James Andrew Bates, a friend from work, at his home in Bentonville, Arkansas. Collins's body was discovered in a hot tub the next morning, and Bates was charged with first-degree murder. Bates had several smart devices in his home, the Echo among them.

It's no mystery that big data presents a challenge to privacy. But perhaps more alarming is the emergence of technology that combines facial recognition and data analytics to create a powerful surveillance tool. It's a disturbing development that combines the most worrisome aspects of algorithmic and big data technology with the chilling and dangerous threats inherent in facial recognition. A Chicago tech company is advertising its "predictive video" to anticipate behavior "based on the emotional state and personality style of any person in a video." In Russia, the app FindFace gives users "the power to identify total strangers on the street," according to The Atlantic. Google's new chat app Allo has a "smart reply" feature that apparently analyzes photos from contacts and offers suggested responses to them .

After a group of researchers scraped up a dataset using open profiles on OkCupid, they argued that the data was "public" and therefore fair game. Not so, writes professor of law Woodrow Hartzog. "This justification is fundamentally wrong. Not just because we should be able to expect a certain amount of privacy in public, but because, despite frequency of use and seeming self-evidence, we actually don't even know what the term public even means," Hartzog argues. "It has no set definition in privacy law or policy."

Suddenly the whole tech industry is knee-deep in AI-powered assistants that live within apps, performing simple, menial tasks for you, saving you time and keeping you productive. Just this month, Microsoft and Facebook released developer tools that make building bots for their platforms easier than ever. Given the scale at which companies like Microsoft and Facebook and WeChat hope to see bots deployed, it's reasonable to worry about how much human oversight the technology might have. And here is where programmers must show caution. Improperly trained or monitored bots can turn ugly when exposed to humans. Don't worry, it's not like there's any danger (yet) of a robot uprising, but unscrupulous types have used bots to deceive people, and everyone saw what happened when Microsoft let Tay run amok.