Cambridge, MA Privacy & Surveillance: Facial Recognition Ban (2026)

Section 2.128.075(A) of the general Municipal Code makes it unlawful for the City or any City staff to "intentionally obtain, retain, request, access, or use" Face Recognition Technology or information obtained from it, notwithstanding any other provision of Chapter 2.128. Face Recognition Technology is defined in §2.128.020(J) as "an automated or semi-automated process that assists in identifying an individual and/or capturing information about an individual, based on the physical characteristics of an individual's face." The ban is absolute rather than a permit-and-approve regime like the rest of Chapter 2.128's Surveillance Technology framework: there is no council-approval pathway that lets a department opt back in.

A narrow carve-out in §2.128.075(B) covers only inadvertent or unintentional receipt of facial-recognition-derived information, and only if staff did not intentionally request, retain, or solicit it and log the incident in the department's Annual Surveillance Report under §2.128.060. The ordinance was adopted as Ord. 1402 on 12/10/2018 and, per §2.128.100, took effect nine months after adoption. Cambridge was among the first U.S. cities to adopt this kind of outright municipal ban, distinguishing it from cities that merely require council review before acquiring facial-recognition systems.