San Francisco bans police from using facial recognition tech on residents

[The AchieVer]

San Francisco bans police from using facial recognition tech on residents

Some residents may be developing the technology but it won’t be permitted for use on their doorstep.

 

 

 

The city of San Francisco has decided to stop the adoption of facial recognition technology in its tracks by banning its use by law enforcement agencies. 

 

San Francisco is slowly becoming a new hotbed for tech startups, some of which might be creating new applications of the technology. However, city officials have decided to restrict its use to prevent residents from being exposed to controversial applications of facial recognition by the police. 

 

An ordinance proposing the restriction was approved on Tuesday and managed to pass by a vote of eight to one. The city is the first area in the country to implement such a ban, as noted by sister site CNET.

 

Under the terms of the new decree, law enforcement agencies must also be transparent about the forms of surveillance technology they use, especially when these applications are connected to requests for funding or grants. 

 

"The propensity for facial recognition technology to endanger civil rights and civil liberties substantially outweighs its purported benefits, and the technology will exacerbate racial injustice and threaten our ability to live free of continuous government monitoring," the ordinance reads. "Whenever possible, decisions regarding if and how surveillance technologies should be funded, acquired, or used, and whether data from such technologies should be shared, should be made only after meaningful public input has been solicited and given significant weight." 

 

While vehicle registration plate detection and surveillance cameras are generally considered acceptable, facial recognition technology is gleefully being explored by police departments across the globe. 

 

In the United Kingdom, the technology has already been trialed in central London and in prisons. 

 

Researchers have claimed that facial recognition systems often contain inherent biasagainst women and people of colour. A separate study performed in 2018 by ACLU found that Amazon's Rekognition facial recognition technology incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress to profiles belonging to those who have been arrested for crimes in the past. 

 

The bill to ban facial recognition technology from being used by law enforcement was introduced by San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin and backed by ACLU of Northern California, alongside other civil liberties groups. 

 

The San Francisco Police Department said in a statement that it does not currently use facial recognition technology but added that until the policy becomes final, it is "unclear what the full impact will be on department operations." 

 

Concerns over government and law enforcement surveillance of the general public are gradually rising, and so a shift to transparency and some forms of restriction can only bring a positive note to the unfortunate road facial recognition appears to be taking. 

 

Other US cities, too, are considering emulating San Francisco's example, including Oakland,  Berkeley, and Somerville. 

 

Some technology vendors are also actively promoting the creation of restraints on the applications of the technology. Last year, Microsoft signaled its approval of laws controlling facial recognition, with Microsoft president Brad Smith asking governments worldwide to implement the steps necessary to control usage before facial recognition tech becomes too entrenched in society. 

 

Smith argued that unrestrained use of facial recognition could erode democratic rights and individual privacy. 

 

Microsoft's call comes at a time when China has enthusiastically adopted facial recognition and surveillance technology to monitor the lives of its citizens. 

 

Now going far beyond the Great Firewall, a censorship tool used to clamp down on access to Internet resources, the country is also using a vast spy net to monitor Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority; apps to collect personal data on citizens; a social credit system based on their behavior which can result in restricted opportunities and travel; and BBC tests recently found that Chinese surveillance cameras were accurate enough to pick out a wanted person in only seven minutes. 

 

 

 

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[The AchieVer]

Police are using flawed data in facial recognition searches, study finds

When the faces aren’t quite there, police have resorted to using celebrity doppelgangers, artist sketches and computer-generated images.

 

A facial recognition matched with an artist sketch.

Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology

Police across the country are making facial recognition searches even when there's barely anything to match it with. 

 

A study from the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology released on Thursday looked at how police are using flawed data to run facial recognition searches, despite years of studies showing that these matches aren't reliable. 

 

That includes using artist sketches, editing images to add eyes and lips, and searching for doppelgangers.

 

"You do not need to be an expert in artificial intelligence to understand that if you search for another person's face, that is not a suspect, there will be issues with the accuracy," Alvaro Bedoya, the founding director of the Center of Privacy and Technology, said. 

 

Civil rights and privacy advocates have warned against government agencies and law enforcement using facial recognition, because there aren't any significant limits to how the technology can be used. On Tuesday, though, San Francisco became the first city to ban police use of facial recognition, and other cities are looking to do the same.  

 

Studies have found issues with accuracy and bias in facial recognition, and critics argue that the technology poses a threat to privacy in public spaces. The study released Thursday turned up more issues with how police are using facial recognition. 

 

When images caught on surveillance cameras are too blurry or don't show enough of a person's face, the New York Police Department has used pictures of celebrities who look like the suspect to make matches with its facial recognition program, the researchers found. 

 

In April 2017, for instance, the NYPD used a photo of actor Woody Harrelson in its facial recognition search to find a suspect and make an arrest. The man was suspected of stealing a beer from a CVS, according to the report. In another case, it used a photo of a New York Knicks player to search for a man wanted for assault in Brooklyn, the researchers found. 

 

When the NYPD couldn't use an image from surveillance footage, they used a celebrity lookalike.

Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology

The department says it stands by its practice.

 

"The NYPD has been deliberate and responsible in its use of facial recognition technology," NYPD spokeswoman detective Denise Moroney said in a statement. "We compare images from crime scenes to arrest photos in law enforcement records. We do not engage in mass or random collection of facial records from NYPD camera systems, the internet, or social media."

 

Records showed that the NYPD made more than 2,800 arrests from facial recognition in the first five and a half years it was in use. 

 

When there were no clear images available, the NYPD, as well as police in about 15 states, were allowed to uses sketches instead. That includes police in Maryland, Virginia, Arizona, Florida and Oregon. 

 

In Washington County, Oregon, which uses Amazon's Rekognition system, a presentation from a case study showed the sheriff's county using police sketches to make matches. 

 

These police departments are running these searches despite multiple studies pointing out that sketches don't return accurate results for facial recognition. The National Institute of Standards and Technology found that sketches had a very high error rate, noting that "sketch searches mostly fail." 

 

In other cases, the Georgetown Law Center found that police departments will generate new faces from photos where features are limited. In one case, the NYPD edited a closed mouth from an image it found on Google onto a suspect so it could better match mugshot images. Police have done the same for eyes.

 

"This is the wild west," Bedoya said. "Copying and pasting a different person's features and putting that on a suspect is unexplored territory."  

 

The image uploaded to the facial recognition search could be a mostly fabricated face, researchers found. 

The researchers also found that police would edit photos to better match its facial recognition search.

Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology

"These techniques amount to the fabrication of facial identity points: at best an attempt to create information that isn't there in the first place and at worst introducing evidence that matches someone other than the person being searched for," the study said. 

 

Police have said that facial recognition is not intended to be conclusive evidence, and only serves as an investigative lead, but researchers found cases where there wasn't much effort beyond using the technology. 

 

In one case, after making the facial recognition match, an officer sent the image to a witness in a text, writing, "Is this the guy?" That was all the confirmation the NYPD needed to make the arrest, the researchers said. 

 

"Facial recognition is merely a lead; it is not a positive identification and it is not probable cause to arrest.  No one has ever been arrested on the basis of a facial recognition match alone," Moroney said. 

 

The NYPD noted that its facial recognition program was used to find and arrest a man who threw urine at subway conductors, and another suspect who allegedly pushed a subway passenger on the tracks. The police department also said its facial recognition has lead to arrests tied to homicides, rapes and robberies. 

 

"The NYPD constantly reassesses our existing procedures and in line with that are in the process of reviewing our existent facial recognition protocols," Moroney said. 

 

The department did not comment on the quality of the data it uses for its facial recognition matches. 

 

 

 

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