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The American Civil Liberties Union, in an effort to demonstrate the dangers of face recognition technology, ran photos of members of Congress against a database of mug shots using Amazon Rekognition software. That test incorrectly identified 28 legislators as criminals (cue the jokes - yes, the Congress members were confirmed to be elsewhere at the time). They hope that demonstrating that this risk hits close to home will get Congress more interested in regulating the use of this technology.
The false matches were disproportionately of people of color, including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, among them civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.). These results demonstrate why Congress should join the ACLU in calling for a moratorium on law enforcement use of face surveillance.
[...] If law enforcement is using Amazon Rekognition, it’s not hard to imagine a police officer getting a “match” indicating that a person has a previous concealed-weapon arrest, biasing the officer before an encounter even begins. Or an individual getting a knock on the door from law enforcement, and being questioned or having their home searched, based on a false identification.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday July 30 2018, @06:12PM
One of the major issues here is that computer analysis can be used to conceal bias.
That's not possible -- there's a bias inherent in the dataset, and if you use a biased dataset to train an AI you're going to end up with a biased AI. "The prison population" doesn't directly tell you anything about who commits crime, it only tells you about who gets caught. If a certain population is over-represented there, it COULD be because they inherently commit more crimes...or because they're targeted more by police, or because they're less able to earn gainful employment and therefore more often forced to resort to crime, or because they're less likely to find competent legal representation, or because they're less competent at the crimes they do commit, or any number of other reasons. If you're only training the AI based on what humans have already done, then it can only learn to mimic humans -- including mimicking our mistakes. So saying that the AI is inherently unbiased is no different from saying the original humans are inherently unbiased. Do you really think the US justice system never makes a mistake and has zero bias in its activities?