Amazon's Facial Recognition Wrongly Identifies 28 Lawmakers, ACLU Says (nytimes.com)

Representative John Lewis of Georgia and Representative Bobby L. Rush of Illinois are both Democrats, members of the Congressional Black Caucus and civil rights leaders. But facial recognition technology made by Amazon, which is being used by some police departments and other organizations, incorrectly matched the lawmakers with people who had been arrested for a crime, the American Civil Liberties Union reported on Thursday morning. From a report: The errors emerged as part of a larger test in which the civil liberties group used Amazon's facial software to compare the photos of all federal lawmakers against a database of 25,000 publicly available mug shots. In the test, the Amazon technology incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress with people who had been arrested, amounting to a 5 percent error rate among legislators. The test disproportionally misidentified African-American and Latino members of Congress as the people in mug shots.

"This test confirms that facial recognition is flawed, biased and dangerous," said Jacob Snow, a technology and civil liberties lawyer with the A.C.L.U. of Northern California. Nina Lindsey, an Amazon Web Services spokeswoman, said in a statement that the company's customers had used its facial recognition technology for various beneficial purposes, including preventing human trafficking and reuniting missing children with their families. She added that the A.C.L.U. had used the company's face-matching technology, called Amazon Rekognition, differently during its test than the company recommended for law enforcement customers.

Comments

Re:AI sometimes isn't perfect either

[lrichardson]

"What about recent law enforcement activities have given you any reason for this hope?"

None. None whatsoever. A female acquaintance at the courthouse for a traffic ticket was arrested, and put behind bars overnight. There was a warrant out for someone with the same first and last name. Of course, the detail she is a petite Caucasian female and the suspect was a large black male might have tipped the LE officer off that her protests had some validity ... but as there is zero repercussions to LE pulling cr4p like this, it is going to continue.

Personally, I'm getting really sick of hearing lawyers state 'He reacted in the way he was trained.' As though the police department training is to blame for lack of common sense, lack of knowledge of the law, and general lack of humanity.

Re:AI sometimes isn't perfect either

[Areyoukiddingme]

In other words their is uncertainty no matter what... the good and the bad news with AI is that you can begin to quantify that uncertainty. So image recognition is good news for improving accuracy over human perception, but bad news if it is either misunderstood or willfully abused to create the misconception of 100% accuracy.

Given how both fingerprints and DNA matching have been painted with the 100% accurate brush (unjustifiably), I expect facial recognition will be too.

Hilarity ensues.

Re:AI sometimes isn't perfect either

[Areyoukiddingme]

Personally, I'm getting really sick of hearing lawyers state 'He reacted in the way he was trained.' As though the police department training is to blame for lack of common sense, lack of knowledge of the law, and general lack of humanity.

Worse.

Police department training has been publicly acknowledged to teach police (I refuse to call them "officers") to protect themselves first and foremost. Their safety is always paramount, and that's flat out bogus. With great power comes great responsibility. You get the uniform, the badge, and the gun, so you can damn well put the public's safety first, or quit the fucking job.

They've been playing the "it's a dangerous job" card for decades, when it's not even in the top 10, and personally I'm sick of it. If it was ACTUALLY dangerous, that'd be one thing, but it's not and we know it.

Re:AI sometimes isn't perfect either

[ranton]

Except it won't be. They'll just arrest the person and "let the courts sort it out." Which never recognizes the damage that simply being arrested by itself can cause to someone.

And that practice will be something for the ACLU to combat. But always assuming the worst possible use of new techniques and technologies is not helpful.