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Facial Recognition Software:
Why Can’t it Accurately Identify Black Faces?
Georgetown’s Center on Privacy and Technology recently issued a study entitled The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America.
The study revealed that more than 110 million Americans, or more than half of all American adults, have been entered into a national database after the FBI used facial recognition software to scan the driver’s license photos of individuals in 26 states and counting.
Additionally, the FBI’s database includes biometric data beyond photographs, such as iris scans, voice prints, and fingerprints.
Privacy considerations aside, facial recognition software has been found time and time again to be inaccurate and unreliable. According to documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center in FOIA requests challenging the FBI’s Biometric Database, the software has an error rate of 20 percent.
This flawed database is widely available to law enforcement agencies at the local, state and national levels. Moreover, the facial recognition software is particularly inaccurate when it comes to identifying and distinguishing between and among the faces of African Americans and Asian Americans.
