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:I expect inevertant programmed racial bias.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll bet the racial bias was in the the criteria they were compared to: mug shots. The mug shots were skewed so there was more matches that were skewed. AI / computer recognition is only as good as the dataset you train it with, here they trained with a biased sample because they used mug shots from a biased justice system.

I note that the NY Times. . .

[Salgak1]

. . . . does not appear to show the mugshots they reportedly matched. That would be a critical point in the argument. I've seen multiple "near-clones" of people over the years: it's entirely likely that the Congresscritters have some as well. . .

Additionally, ARRESTED does not make one a criminal. Conviction does. The wrong people get arrested all the time: cops are FAR from perfect. . .and like Slashdot, they like simple solutions to their problems....