Cops Say They Only Use Facial Recognition for Leads, but It’s Often the Sole Basis for Arrests, Study Finds
Even under the best conditions, the people using the technology introduce their own problems. As the report puts it, “algorithms and humans may compound the other’s mistakes.” Users make false assumptions about the tech’s accuracy. And when a facial recognition scan turns out a lineup of possible suspects, the people interpreting those results are biased by facial features such as demographics and expressions.
“Over its past 20 years of use, face recognition algorithms have improved, but the people running the searches have not,” Garvie said. “Police departments are still not required to implement policies and training programs to guard against cognitive bias, misuse, and mistake.”Law enforcement officials and companies who make facial recognition software acknowledge those issues, and often say the technology should only be used to generate leads.
A key problem is there are no clear guidelines about how facial recognition technology should be used, in part because the technology is new, but also because we don’t fully understand facial recognition’s flaws. If and when those guidelines are developed, they will likely come in response to the prosecution of innocent people, they wrote.
According to Garvie, failing to disclose the details about facial recognition in a criminal case violates people’s legal rights. “This is a due process violation, one that has been happening since 2001,” she said.We’ve known about facial recognition’s problems for a long time, but law enforcement and large swaths of the public continue to put blind trust in the technology.
“There is still a tendency to place undue faith in an artificial neutral, mathematics-based approach to solving hard problems or eliminating human error from decision-making,” Garvie said. “This is the wrong approach.”
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