US Government To Rein In Face Recognition? Yeah, Right

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Produced by a National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) committee after spending two years studying the capabilities and implications of the technology at the behest of the FBI and Homeland Security, the report concluded that facial recognition needs to be formally reined in.

According to the panel's write-up, concerns over technical limitations and/or misuse of face recognition systems are well founded and require action from the government to address. As part of its conclusions, the committee recommended a presidential executive order to develop guidelines for appropriate use and fresh legislation "to address equity, privacy and civil liberties concerns" regarding the technology.

"It is crucial that governments make tackling these issues a priority," said Jennifer Mnookin, co-chair of the committee behind the report. "Failing or choosing not to adopt policies and regulations ... would effectively cede decision-making and rulemaking on these important questions of great public concern entirely to the private sector and the marketplace."

The report backs up a lot of what's been previously established about facial recognition technology, namely that it has issues with bias across racial and gender demographics - such as wrongly identifying women or people of color - and this has led to some bans on its use.

False negative rates, the report found, were higher by a factor of three for women and non-whites, with the authors citing "algorithms designed in Western countries and trained mostly on White faces" as the culprit.

"Much progress has been made in recent years to characterize, understand, and mitigate phenotypical disparities in the accuracy of FRT [facial-recognition technology] results," the report found, while also noting that "these performance differentials have not been entirely eliminated."

While those facts aren't anything new, it's nice to know Homeland Security and the FBI are finally being told this by a report they had a hand in (it was made independently of the agencies, but they did provide guidance on some of the issues investigated) - but will the findings stick?

There's an increasing number of federal agencies using face recognition systems, and American states are adopting the technology at increasing rates as well, with few legal limits stopping them from implementing it any way they see fit.

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