Issue 105: Facial Recognition

Police have shown, time and time again, that they cannot be trusted with face recognition technology (FRT). It is too dangerous, invasive, and in the hands of law enforcement, a perpetual liability. EFF has long argued that face recognition, whether it is fully accurate or not, is too dangerous for police use, and such use ought to be banned. Now, The Washington Post has proved one more reason for this ban: police claim to use FRT just as an investigatory lead, but in practice officers routinely ignore protocol and immediately arrest the most likely match spit out by the computer without first doing their own investigation.

Parabon NanoLabs ran the suspect’s DNA through its proprietary machine learning model. Soon, it provided the police department with something the detectives had never seen before: the face of a potential suspect, generated using only crime scene evidence.... The face of the murderer, the company predicted, was male. He had fair skin, brown eyes and hair, no freckles, and bushy eyebrows. A forensic artist employed by the company photoshopped a nondescript, close-cropped haircut onto the man and gave him a mustache—an artistic addition informed by a witness description and not the DNA sample. In a controversial 2017 decision, the department published the predicted face in an attempt to solicit tips from the public. Then, in 2020, one of the detectives did something civil liberties experts say is even more problematic—and a violation of Parabon NanoLabs’ terms of service: He asked to have the rendering run through facial recognition software.

To prevent students from cheating, the university had bought software from the tech firm Proctorio, which uses face detection to verify the identity of the person taking the exam. But when Pocornie, who is Black, tried to scan her face, the software kept saying it couldn’t recognize her: stating “no face found.” That’s where the Ikea lamp came in. For that first exam in September 2020, and the nine others that followed, the only way Pocornie could get Proctorio’s software to recognize her was if she shone the lamp uncomfortably close to her face—flooding her features with white light during the middle of the day

A Las Vegas police union has raised concerns about a new NFL policy that would require officers who work security at Raiders games to share their photo for facial recognition purposes and is urging officers to think twice before complying. Traditionally, officers who worked overtime hours as security for Raiders games would receive a wristband that got them access to different parts of the field and stadium, explained Steve Grammas, president of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association. But now, the NFL is asking that officers each provide a photo, which will be used for “identification purposes when an individual steps up to a scanner to verify who the person is and if they have access to that particular space,” explained Tim Schlittner, director of communications for the NFL, in an email.

Authorities in several major Chinese cities have ordered hotels to stop using facial recognition technology to verify the identity of guests in a sign the government is responding to public concerns over privacy, financial news site Caixin reported. Guests staying at hotels in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou will now only be required to present identification in order to check in, according to state-run tabloid The Global Times.

The technology, which marries Meta’s smart Ray Ban glasses with the facial recognition service Pimeyes and some other tools, lets someone automatically go from face, to name, to phone number, and home address.

A viral TikTok account is doxing ordinary and otherwise anonymous people on the internet using off-the-shelf facial recognition technology, creating content and growing a following by taking advantage of a fundamental new truth: privacy is now essentially dead in public spaces. The 90,000 follower-strong account typically picks targets who appeared in other viral videos, or people suggested to the account in the comments. Many of the account’s videos show the process: screenshotting the video of the target, cropping images of the face, running those photos through facial recognition software, and then revealing the person’s full name, social media profile, and sometimes employer to millions of people who have liked the videos.... 404 Media is not naming the account because TikTok has decided to not remove it from the platform. TikTok told me the account does not violate its policies; one social media policy expert I spoke to said TikTok should reevaluate that position.

A bipartisan group of 12 senators has urged the Transportation Security Administration’s inspector general to investigate the agency’s use of facial recognition, saying it poses a significant threat to privacy and civil liberties.... While the TSA’s facial recognition program is currently optional and only in a few dozen airports, the agency announced in June that it plans to expand the technology to more than 430 airports. And the senators’ letter quotes a talk given by TSA Administrator David Pekoske in 2023 in which he said “we will get to the point where we require biometrics across the board.” ... The latest letter urges the TSA’s inspector general to evaluate the agency’s facial recognition program to determine whether it’s resulted in a meaningful reduction in passenger delays, assess whether it’s prevented anyone on no-fly lists from boarding a plane, and identify how frequently it results in identity verification errors.

In early 1945, a fellow named Henry DeWolf Smyth was called into an office in Washington and asked if he would write this book that was about a new kind of weapon that the US was developing. The guy who had called him into his office, Vannevar Bush, knew that by the end of the year, the US was going to drop an atomic bomb that had the potential to end the war, but also that as soon as it was dropped, everybody was going to want to know what is this weapon, how was it made, and so forth. Smyth accepted the assignment. It was published by Princeton University Press about a week after the bomb was dropped. It explained how the US made the bomb, but it told a very specific kind of story, the Oppenheimer story that you see in the movies, where a group of shaggy-haired physicists figured out how to split the atom and fission, and all of this stuff. The thing is, the physics of building an atomic bomb is, in some respects, the least important part. More important, if you actually want to make the thing explode, is the chemistry, the metallurgy, the engineering that were left out of the story.