There is a small but growing lobby made up of people who have been wrongly arrested as a result of facial recognition technology. Among them is Robert Williams, an American who was handcuffed in front of his family in 2020 after police facial recognition misidentified him as a suspect in a federal larceny case.
Williams is now calling for police forces in Ireland to scrap their plans to deploy the biometric tech. In comments made at an event in Dublin hosted by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) and issued in a release, Williams points to the risk that comes with using tools that are prone to misidentify people of color.
“Federal studies have shown that facial recognition systems misidentify Asian and Black people up to 100 times more often than white people,” Williams says. “In America, we’re trying to undo the harms that FRT has already done. Here in Ireland, you have an opportunity not to introduce it in the first place. I hope your government will listen to experiences like mine and think twice before bringing FRT into policing.”
Williams refers to a 2019 report from NIST, which has since been updated, showing that some algorithms were 10 to 100 times more likely to misidentify a Black or East Asian than a white face. Not all of the algorithms evaluated are in commercial production, however, and others were found to have imperceptible differences in performance between demographics, prompting NIST Biometric Standards and Testing Lead Patrick Grother to urge those implementing facial recognition to be specific in evaluating bias.
Williams’ statement on the U.S. could also be debated, given the uptake of facial recognition technology by law enforcement agencies across the country. And while it is true that Irish police could still decide to pass on facial recognition, it is unlikely. The government is in the process of drafting legislation that would give Gardaí access to FRT. And police in the neighboring UK have embraced facial recognition with aplomb.
Nor is it merely an island thing. Police in Sweden are currently pushing against the limits of the still-fresh AI Act with plans to deploy 1:N facial recognition in public spaces. And Canadian police recently contracted Idemia to provide facial recognition services.
Hellbound and Down 