FACIAL RECOGNITION SYSTEMS and the data they are based upon are racially biased and “inherently flawed,” according to Dr Abeba Birhane, Adjunct Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin.
During a conference on Policing for Peace run by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) in Dublin today, Dr Birhane said that data from the US shows that black people are far more likely to be classified as “criminal” by facial recognition systems.
Error rates are also much higher for those with darker skin, with Dr Birhane showing data that black people were incorrectly identified 12.9% of the time in Microsoft’s recognition software, versus 0.7% for white people.
Similar research shown by Dr Birhane also highlighted the much higher rates of misclassification of black people as non-human, falling into categories like ‘animal’, ‘chimpanzee’ or ‘gorilla’ approximately 14% of the time, with all other races being misclassified as these in fewer than 8% of cases.
Six people have incorrectly gone to jail in the US because of facial recognition systems, according to Dr Birhane, who also advises Mozilla on AI accountability, and all of those people were black.
“Facial recognition systems are inherently flawed,” she said, adding that it is “pure pseudoscience” to try and identify factors such as political leanings and sexual orientation from a face.
Birhane also criticised the transparency around how much of the data is collected, saying “the whole field is based on opaqueness”.
Also speaking at the event was Dr Daragh Murray, Lecturer at the Queen Mary University of London School of Law, who said society doesn’t yet fully understand the implications of facial recognition being deployed on a mass scale.
Murray said that because it was a “step change in police surveillance capability,” it should be treated with caution.
The application of facial recognition technology removes the possibility of anonymity in a city, so it allows these [police] forces to look at what happens in the city not only in the moment, but also back in time, and that’s an incredibly powerful thing.
“It’s also a tool that allows a lot of other data sources to be brought together,” he said, warning of the possibility of inferring people’s sexual orientation or their political beliefs based on profiles that are generated from information collected from several sources.
The debate on facial recognition comes as the Seanad is set to debate The Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) Bill later today, which would allow for the recording of footage by Gardaí from bodycams, mobile devices, helicopters, Garda dogs and drones.
Introducing the Bill in February, the then-Minister for Justice, Simon Harris, called it a necessary step to “significantly strengthen the capacity of An Garda Síochána to tackle crime and protect national security”.
But ICCL Executive Director Liam Herrick has warned that the legislation “could have significant negative human rights implications” and called for it to be in line with the recommendations of the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland, which published its results more than five years ago.
In preparation for the passing of the legislation, An Garda Síochána began the process of buying bodycams for frontline officers in September, which they anticipate will be fully rolled out in 2025 after a pilot scheme next year.
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