Police in Columbia, South Carolina, and the surrounding county likewise used facial recognition, though from a different vendor, to arrest several protesters after the fact, according to local paper The State.
The ongoing nationwide protests, which seek to bring attention to systemic racial disparities in policing, have drawn more attention to the use of facial recognition systems by police in general.
Repeated tests and studies have shown that most facial recognition algorithms in use today are significantly more likely to generate false positives or other errors when trying to match images featuring people of color. Late last year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology published research finding that facial recognition systems it tested had the highest accuracy when identifying white men but were 10 to 100 times more likely to make mistakes with Black, Asian, or Native American faces.
There's another, particularly 2020 wrinkle thrown in when it comes to matching photos of civil rights protesters, too: NIST found in July that most facial recognition algorithms perform significantly more poorly when matching masked faces. A significant percentage of the millions of people who have shown up for marches, rallies, and demonstrations around the country this summer have worn masks to mitigate against the risk of COVID-19 transmission in large crowds.
The ACLU in June filed a complaint against the Detroit police, alleging the department arrested the wrong man based on a flawed, incomplete match provided by facial recognition software. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Microsoft, and other firms nearly all sent Clearview orders to stop within days of the report becoming public, but the company still boasts it has around 3 billion images on hand for partners to match individuals' pictures against.
Original article