ABSTRACT
Williams learned that in investigating a theft from the store, a facial recognition system had tagged his driver’s license photo as matching the surveillance image. Recent studies from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have confirmed that computer facial recognition is less accurate at matching African-American faces than Caucasian ones. Facial recognition technology has widespread effects through its association with broad surveillance and massive stores of photographs. In the 1920s, investigators began wiretapping telephones to trace criminal activities. In the 1970s, analog closed-circuit television added remote visual monitoring of people. The rate of failing to match a submitted face to one in the database dropped from 4% in 2014 to only 0.2% by 2018. Newer algorithms were also less sensitive to the variations in facial appearance that plagued early efforts.
