Security News

So far this year, the use of facial recognition by law enforcement has been successfully challenged by courts and legislatures on both sides of the Atlantic. Unconstrained use of facial recognition services by state and local government agencies poses broad social ramifications that should be considered and addressed.

Face masks not only have shown in research to slow the spread of COVID-19, they also deter facial-recognition technology from correctly identifying people, according to a new study. New research from the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that even the best of 89 commercial facial recognition algorithms tested experienced error rates between 5 percent and 50 percent when matching people in digitally applied face masks with photos of the same person without a mask.

Privacy watchdogs in Britain and Australia have opened a joint investigation into facial recognition company Clearview AI over its use of personal data "Scraped" off social media platforms and other websites. Clearview AI Inc. came to attention after investigative reports detailed its practice of harvesting billions of photos from social media and other services to identify people.

Williams, a black man living in Michigan, was arrested in January when police used automatic facial recognition to match his old driver's license photo to a store's blurry surveillance footage of a black man allegedly stealing watches. The Detroit Police Department claims that it doesn't make arrests based solely on facial recognition.

Today, Facebook and Instagram can automatically tag a user in photos, while Google Photos can group one's photos together via the people present in those photos using Google's own image recognition technology. Led by Professor Mohan Kankanhalli, Dean of the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore, the research team from the School's Department of Computer Science has developed a technique that safeguards sensitive information in photos by making subtle changes that are almost imperceptible to humans but render selected features undetectable by known algorithms.

Paul Bischoff, consumer privacy expert with Comparitech, found that Amazon's face recognition platform incorrectly misidentified more than 100 photos of US and UK lawmakers as criminals. Rekognition, Amazon's cloud-based facial recognition platform that was first launched in 2016, has been sold and used by a number of United States government agencies, including ICE and Orlando, Florida police, as well as private entities.

The Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act would explicitly ban police from using the technology. Members of Congress introduced a new bill on Thursday that would ban government use of biometric technology, including facial recognition tools.

South Wales Police and the UK Home Office "Fundamentally disagree" that automated facial recognition software is as intrusive as collecting fingerprints or DNA, a barrister for the force told the Court of Appeal yesterday. Jason Beer QC, representing the South Wales Police also blamed the Information Commissioner's Office for "Dragging" the court into the topic of whether the police force's use of the creepy cameras complied with the Data Protection Act.

Lawmakers have proposed legislation that would indefinitely ban the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement nationwide. While various cities have banned government use of the technology, the bill would be the first temporary ban on facial recognition technology ever enacted nationwide.

A top judge told a barrister for the UK Information Commissioner's Office today that his legal arguments against police facial-recognition technology face "a great difficulty" as he wondered whether they were even relevant to the case. In plain English, Facenna was saying that South Wales Police's legal justification for deploying facial-recognition tech, as detailed yesterday, didn't comply with the Human Rights Act-guaranteed right to privacy - nor the Data Protection Act 2018 section, which states: "The processing of personal data for any of the law enforcement purposes is lawful only if and to the extent that it is based on law."