Officials described the program as dead before it began. A contract obtained by The Defender shows a signed, auto-renewing agreement giving a failing penny-stock company rights to riders’ faces, video, and voices, with no policy to protect the data and a clause keeping the deal quiet.
The short version
On July 24, 2025, the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority (KCATA) signed a three-year, auto-renewing contract with SafeSpace Global (OTC: SSGC) to deploy AI-powered facial recognition technology for the cameras on its buses. The agreement, obtained by The Kansas City Defender, authorized the company to generate facial recognition profiles of riders, capture video and audio, and use riders’ de-identified data to train its algorithms. The contract barred both parties from public announcements, and for a year it appeared nowhere in the public record while officials described the program as stalled. KCATA had no rider-specific policy governing the biometric data. The agency says the pilot never launched because state funding did not materialize, a claim that has not been independently verified, but the contract remained signed, binding, and self-renewing. SafeSpace is a penny stock with a $23.7 million deficit and a going-concern warning, led by a CEO whose prior company was charged with SEC accounting fraud.
Every rider who steps onto a Kansas City bus does something ordinary. They tap a card, find a seat, and watch the city move past on the way to a shift, a clinic, a classroom. What almost none of them know is that their transit agency signed a contract that treated their faces as raw material…