Facial Recognition Software On Law Enforcement May Put Innocent People in Jeopardy

Facial recognition app may put the lives of the innocent people in jeopardy, a recent test reveals.

In a test conducted on California legislators, 26 of their photos on facial recognition app matched with the mug shots of people who had cases and were arrested. The said legislators were never arrested before and did not have any criminal records.

The abovementioned result is similar to the common-face scanning program conducted last year on federal legislators. In the said scanning program, 28 of the federal legislators’ facial recognition app photos matched the mug shots of people arrested for criminal cases.

The common-face scanning program is organized by the ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union. The scanning is done comparing the tested person’s photo against the 25,000 booking photos publicly available.

The result on both tests indicates that on average, one out of five legislators was mistakenly matched. The said results show that the Facial-recognition app might put the lives of innocent faces in jeopardy due to the incorrect matching.

Phil Ting, one of the California Assemblymen that got mistakenly matched to mug shots of arrested people believes that the Facial Recognition app is unreliable. He is also one of the legislators who are requesting for the California law enforcement to ban the use of the said app while on duty.

Ting declared in an interview that the Facial recognition app is not ready for law enforcement capacity. He added that the said mistakes can be laughed at for some but the serious impact happens when an innocent citizen gets arrested due to mismatching. He clarified that one arrest marks on a person’s record and will even make it hard for him to get housing or get a job.

Meanwhile, both the manufacturers of the body-worn cameras as well as the facial recognition app maker cannot stand on the app’s reliability for law enforcement tasks. Axon, one of the largest makers of body-worn cameras announced that they will never go for putting the facial recognition technology on their cameras. Microsoft, one known facial recognition app maker, on the other hand, had a recent case of refusing the sales of facial recognition app to a California law enforcement agency.