Feds are increasing use of facial recognition systems – despite calls for a moratorium
Despite growing opposition, the U.S. government is on track to increase its use of controversial facial recognition technology.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report on Aug. 24, 2021, detailing current and planned use of facial recognition technology by federal agencies. The GAO surveyed 24 departments and agencies – from the Department of Defense to the Small Business Administration – and found that 18 reported using the technology and 10 reported plans to expand their use of it.
The report comes more than a year after the U.S. Technology Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, called for an immediate halt to virtually all government use of facial recognition technology.
The U.S. Technology Policy Committee is one of numerous groups and prominent figures, including the ACLU, the American Library Association and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, to call for curbs on use of the technology. A common theme of this opposition is the lack of standards and regulations for facial recognition technology.
A year ago, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft also announced that they would stop selling facial recognition technology to police departments pending federal regulation of the technology. Congress is weighing a moratorium on government use of the technology. Some cities and states, notably Maine, have introduced restrictions.
Why computing experts say no
The Association for Computing Machinery’s U.S. Technology Policy Committee, which issued the call for a moratorium, includes computing professionals from academia, industry and government, a number of whom were actively involved in the development or analysis of the technology. As chair of the committee at the time the statement was issued and as a computer science researcher, I can explain what prompted our committee to recommend this ban and, perhaps more significantly, what it would take for the committee to rescind its call.
If your cellphone doesn’t recognize your face and makes you type in your passcode, or if the photo-sorting software you’re using misidentifies a family member, no real harm is done. On the other hand, if you become liable for arrest or denied entrance to a facility because the recognition algorithms are imperfect, the impact can be drastic.
The statement we wrote outlines principles for the use of facial recognition technologies in these consequential applications. The first and most critical of these is the need to understand the accuracy of these systems. One of the key problems with these algorithms is that they perform differently for different ethnic groups.
An evaluation of facial recognition vendors by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology found that the majority of the systems tested had clear differences in their ability to match two images of the same person when one ethnic group was compared with another. Another study found the algorithms are more accurate for lighter-skinned males than for darker-skinned females. Researchers are also exploring how other features, such as age, disease and disability status, affect these systems. These studies are also turning up disparities.
A number of other features affect the performance of these algorithms. Consider the difference between how you might look in a nice family photo you have shared on social media versus a picture of you taken by a grainy security camera, or a moving police car, late on a misty night. Would a system trained on the former perform well in the latter context? How lighting, weather, camera angle and other factors affect these algorithms is still an open question.
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September 03, 2021 at 02:44AM
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