RCW 43.386

Washington regulated government facial recognition in 2020, with the chapter’s operative sections effective 1 July 2021.^[1] It binds every state and local agency, and it works through paper a resident can ask for.

Before deploying a facial recognition service, an agency must file a notice of intent with its legislative authority, which for a county is the county council or board of commissioners, and produce an accountability report: the vendor and the system’s capabilities “including reasonably foreseeable capabilities outside the scope of the proposed use”, the data it takes in and puts out, a use and data management policy covering retention, sharing and training, error rates and impacts on protected subpopulations, and the civil rights impacts with mitigation steps.^[1] The draft must go through public review and comment and at least three community consultation meetings, and the final report must be posted on the agency’s website at least ninety days before the service goes into operational use, then updated every two years.^[1]

Use is gated too. An agency may not use facial recognition for ongoing surveillance, real-time identification or persistent tracking without a warrant, exigent circumstances, or a court order limited to locating a missing or identifying a deceased person.^[1] Results may not be the sole basis for probable cause, decisions with legal effects require “meaningful human review” by someone with authority to change the decision, and use against a criminal defendant must be disclosed before trial.^[1] Vendors must expose an interface so the technology can be independently tested for accuracy and unfair performance differences across subpopulations, and material differences found must be mitigated within ninety days.^[1]

For county research the accountability report is the lever: if a Washington agency runs facial recognition, a public, posted, biennially updated report is supposed to exist, and its absence from an agency’s website is itself checkable. Contracts signed before 1 July 2021 were grandfathered until renewal or extension.^[1]