Last year, residents of Atlantic Plaza Towers, a rent-stabilized apartment building in Brooklyn, found out that their landlord was planning to replace the key fob entry system with facial recognition technology. The goal, ostensibly, was to modernize the building’s security system.

But some residents were immediately alarmed by the prospect: They felt the landlord’s promise of added security was murky at best, and didn’t outweigh their concerns about having to surrender sensitive biometric information to enter their own homes. Last week, lawyers representing 134 concerned residents of the building filed an objectionwith the state housing regulator. It is the first visible opposition in New York City to the deployment of such technology in the residential realm.

“We’re calling ourselves the Rosa Parks of facial recognition in residential buildings,” said Icemae Downes, a resident who has lived in the building since 1968 and was part of a residents’ protest last week. “We’re standing up to say, ‘No, we don’t feel this is right.’”

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