PDA

View Full Version : U.S. Police Are Abusing Facial Recognition Technology



zeekboy
20-05-2019, 11:38 AM
https://i.postimg.cc/fRQhzfqw/screen-shot-2019-05-14-at-5-22-54-pm-1558030839.png
Departments may be feeding their software flawed data. Will there be consequences?

Facial recognition software is increasingly becoming common in police departments around the globe. But a new scathing report from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology (CPT) discusses how the law enforcement across the country uses—and consistently abuses–facial recognition.
The CPT's report, titled "Garbage In, Garbage Out," details how police departments across the country are feeding facial recognition software flawed data. When looking for a suspect, police will feed an algorithm pictures of celebrities who they think share physical features with the suspect or composite sketches.
"On multiple occasions, when blurry or flawed photos of suspects have failed to turn up good leads, analysts have instead picked a celebrity they thought looked like the suspect, then run the celebrity’s photo through their automated face recognition system looking for a lead," reads a report summary.
After noticing one suspect's resemblance to the actor Woody Harrelson, for example, one New York City police officer fed the system pictures of Harrelson that he had found on Google. Using matches for Harrelson, investigating officers were later able to make an arrest. Other times, police departments across the country have fed algorithms composite sketches.

"The stakes are too high in criminal investigations to rely on unreliable—or wrong—inputs," warns the report. "It is one thing for a company to build a face recognition system designed to help individuals find their celebrity doppelgänger or painting lookalike for entertainment purposes. It's quite another to use these techniques to identify criminal suspects, who may be deprived of their liberty and ultimately prosecuted based on the match. Unfortunately, police departments' reliance on questionable probe photos appears all too common."
Although not universal, these tactics are widespread. State and local police departments in Maryland, Virginia, Florida, Oregon and Arizona all confirmed to the CPT that sketches could be submitted to their face recognition systems. In Arizona, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office gives officers a brochure, which states that "suspect sketches and even forensic busts" can be used with facial recognition software.

The ability of these systems to use composite sketches is a selling point made by market leaders like Amazon, the German-based Cognitec, and the California-based Vigilant Solutions.
"Vigilant’s tools help enable agencies to edit the images for better-quality probe images, including creating a proxy image from a sketch artist or artist rendering," reads the company's website.
https://i.postimg.cc/90TCb8gn/two-examples-of-failed-retrievals-on-good-sketches-where-the-fir.png
These photos represent an example of an imposter, as opposed to the subject of the forensic sketch, is determined as the highest ranking face recognition match.