from the but-the-good-stuff-works-too-well! dept
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While each iteration presents a chance too improve,there are some very real reasons why facial recognition tech will do a bit of stagnating. And that reason is the biggest market for this tech: law enforcement agencies.
In 2019, the US National Institute for science and Technology studied 189 different facial recognition algorithms.The results were conclusive: every single one of them performed worse when asked to “recognize” anything other than white male faces. Asians and African Americans were more than 100 times more likely to be misidentified by the tech. While some were a little bit better, the average across the board was bad news for peopel who’ve already been subjected to decades of biased policing.
Adding tech to existing biases only allows them to compound the inequities faster. That’s something that was pointed out less than a year later to the EU Parliament. Allowing cops to control both the input and the output just means the systems will generate plausible deniability for racist policing, rather than create a playing field that’s a bit more level.
Not only does facial recognition tech have a built-in bias problem, it also seems to have a problem with recognizing faces, no matter what color those faces are. Police forces in the UK have seen this happen repeatedly racking up alarming false positive rates during tech rollouts. Despite these failures (and the unacknowledged flip side of false positives: false negatives), the UK government continues to expand use of facial recognition tech.
UK Police Facial Recognition System Exposed as Flawed, response is to Revert to Broken status Quo
Recent reports have revealed significant flaws in the UK’s police facial recognition technology, leading to a surprising response from law enforcement: a return to the system’s previously known, problematic state. The issues, highlighted by independent testing, demonstrate unacceptably high error rates, particularly concerning misidentification and bias.
Independent testing Reveals Significant Errors
the National physical Laboratory (NPL) conducted independent testing of the facial recognition system used by UK police forces. The results, as reported by the BBC, showed substantial inaccuracies. The testing revealed that the system struggled with diverse skin tones and consistently produced a high number of false positives. BBC News details how the error rates were so significant that the system was temporarily taken offline for adjustments.
Police Response: Back to the Beginning
Instead of pursuing substantial improvements to the technology, UK law enforcement agencies, at the insistence of the Home Office and the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), opted to revert the system to its original settings. This decision effectively reinstates the flawed algorithm that was previously identified as problematic. According to the NPCC lead for facial recognition, Assistant Chief Constable Chris Blakeman, Techdirt reports, “to revert to the original algorithm threshold was not taken lightly and was made to best protect the public from those who could cause harm, illustrating the balance that must be struck in policing’s use of facial recognition.”
The Illusion of Training
Blakeman insists additional training is all that’s needed to overcome the known limitations of the tech. Anyone who has ever attended mandatory training knows this simply isn’t true. All that means is that a bunch of people will doze or daydream through these sessions and pencil whip whatever form is given to them that will supposedly “verify” that all the training they never paid attention to has been put to use. Blakeman even said some of this training will be “reissued,” which makes it clear no one was paying any attention to it the frist time around.
A Return to Abusive Practices
It’s amazing.When confronted with the fact that their tech is flawed, UK law enforcement agencies demanded everything be reverted back to the fully-broken “normal” they’d been allowed to abuse as the tech’s inception. And now that this is all out in the open, police spokespeople are back to pretending law enforcement has anything to do with competently and carefully enforcing laws.
Filed Under: biased policing, facial recognition, false positives, home office, national physical laboratory, national police chiefs council, uk
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