Technology

ACLU Ran Headshots Of California State Lawmakers Through Facial Recognition Software. It Mistook 1 In 5 As Criminals

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Roughly one in five California state lawmakers was misidentified as a person who had been arrested when the American Civil Liberties Union used facial recognition software to screen their pictures against a massive database of available mugshots.

California Assemblyman Phil Ting, a Democrat, was one of 26 California legislators who was incorrectly matched, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday. Ting, who represents San Francisco, crafted a bill in May banning facial recognition software from being used on police body cameras.

“The software clearly is not ready for use in a law enforcement capacity,” Ting told reporters. “These mistakes, we can kind of chuckle at it, but if you get arrested and it’s on your record, it can be hard to get housing, get a job. It has real impacts.”

San Francisco is already one step ahead of the rest of the state. The city voted in May to make the Bay Area the first major American city to block a tool police rely on to identify criminal suspects. Civil liberty groups worry the technology’s potential could push the U.S. in the direction of an overly oppressive surveillance state.

Critics of the ban argue San Francisco is effectively tossing the good out with the bad.

“It is ridiculous to deny the value of this technology in securing airports and border installations,” Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University, told reporters. “It is hard to deny that there is a public safety value to this technology.”

The technology is used in several cities across the country, but is not being deployed in San Francisco, despite local concerns. Police believe the decision hinders their job nonetheless. Authorities used a similar piece of technology to identify a person who shot and killed several people in 2018 at the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland.

Amazon, which develops the Rekognition software used in the ACLU’s study, did not immediately reply to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.