EFF Report: Law Enforcement Use of Face Recognition Threatens Civil Liberties, Disproportionately Affects People of Color

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

> https://supporters.eff.org/civicrm/mailing/view?reset=1&id=2700 
> <https://supporters.eff.org/civicrm/mailing/view?reset=1&id=2700>
>
> for immediate release: thursday, february 15, 2018
>
> Face recognition is rapidly creeping into modern life, and face recognition systems will one day be capable of 
> capturing the faces of people, often without their knowledge, walking down the street, entering stores, standing in 
> line at the airport, attending sporting events, driving their cars, and utilizing public spaces. Researchers at 
> Georgetown Law School estimated  <https://www.perpetuallineup.org/>that one in every two American adults—117 million 
> people—are already in law enforcement face recognition systems.
>
> This kind of surveillance will have a chilling effect on Americans’ willingness to exercise their rights to speak out 
> and be politically engaged, the report says. Law enforcement has already used face recognition at political protests, 
> and may soon use face recognition with body-worn cameras, to identify people in the dark, and to project what someone 
> might look like from a police sketch or even a small sample of DNA.
>
> Face recognition employs computer algorithms to pick out details about a person’s face from a photo or video to form 
> a template. As the report explains, police use face recognition to identify unknown suspects by comparing their 
> photos to images stored in databases and to scan public spaces to try to find specific pre-identified targets.
>
> But no face recognition system is 100 percent accurate, and false positives—when a person’s face is incorrectly 
> matched to a template image—are common. Research  
> <http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6327355/?reload=true&tp=&arnumber=6327355&url=http:%2F>shows that face 
> recognition misidentifies African Americans and ethnic minorities, young people, and women at higher rights that 
> whites, older people, and men, respectively. And because of well-documented racially-biased police practices, all 
> criminal databases—including mugshot databases—include a disproportionate number of African-Americans, Latinos, and 
> immigrants.
>
> For both reasons, inaccuracies in facial recognition systems will disproportionately affect people of color.
>
> “The FBI, which has access to at least 400 million images and is the central source for facial recognition 
> identification for federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, has failed to address the problem of false 
> positives and inaccurate results,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch, author of the report. “It has 
> conducted few tests to ensure accuracy and has done nothing to ensure its external partners—federal and state 
> agencies—are not using face recognition in ways that allow innocent people to be identified as criminal suspects.”
>
> Lawmakers, regulators, and policy makers should take steps now to limit face recognition collection and subject it to 
> independent oversight, the report says. Legislation is needed to place meaningful checks on government use of face 
> recognition, including rules limiting retention and sharing, requiring notification when face prints are collected, 
> ensuring robust security procedures to prevent data breaches, and establishing legal processes governing when law 
> enforcement may collect face images from the public without their knowledge, the report concludes.
>
> “People should not have to worry that they may be falsely accused of a crime because an algorithm mistakenly matched 
> their photo to a suspect. They shouldn’t have to worry that their data will end up in the hands of identify thieves 
> because face recognition databases were breached. They shouldn’t have to fear that their every move will be tracked 
> if face recognition is linked to the networks of surveillance cameras that blanket many cities,” said Lynch. “Without 
> meaningful legal protections, this is where we may be headed.”
>
> For the report:
> https://www.eff.org/wp/law-enforcement-use-face-recognition 
> <https://www.eff.org/wp/law-enforcement-use-face-recognition>
> For this release:
> https://www.eff.org/press/releases/law-enforcement-use-face-recognition-systems-threatens-civil-liberties 
> <https://www.eff.org/press/releases/law-enforcement-use-face-recognition-systems-threatens-civil-liberties>
> For more on face recognition:
> https://www.eff.org/document/facial-recognition-one-pager <https://www.eff.org/document/facial-recognition-one-pager>


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