Civil Rights Commission Pans Face Recognition Technology

In its recent report, Civil Rights Implications of Face Recognition Technology (FRT), the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights identified serious problems with the federal government’s use of face recognition technology, and in doing so recognized EFF’s expertise on this issue. The Commission focused its investigation on the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

According to the report, the DOJ primarily uses FRT within the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Marshals Service to generate leads in criminal investigations. DHS uses it in cross-border criminal investigations and to identify travelers. And HUD implements FRT with surveillance cameras in some federally funded public housing. The report explores how federal training on FRT use in these departments is inadequate, identifies threats that FRT poses to civil rights, and proposes ways to mitigate those threats.

EFF supports a ban on government use of FRT and strict regulation of private use. In April of this year, we submitted comments to the Commission to voice these views. The Commission’s report quotes our comments explaining how FRT works, including the steps by which FRT uses a probe photo (the photo of the face that will be identified) to run an algorithmic search that matches the face within the probe photo to those in the comparison data set. Although EFF aims to promote a broader understanding of the technology behind FRT, our main purpose in submitting the comments was to sound the alarm about the many dangers the technology poses.

These disparities in accuracy are due in part to algorithmic bias.

The government should not use face recognition because it is too inaccurate to determine people’s rights and benefits, its inaccuracies impact people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community at far higher rates, it threatens privacy, it chills expression, and it introduces information security risks. The report highlights many of the concerns that we’ve stated about privacy, accuracy (especially in the context of criminal investigations), and use by “inexperienced and inadequately trained operators.” The Commission also included data showing that face recognition is much more likely to reach a false positive (inaccurately matching two photos of different people) than a false negative (inaccurately failing to match two photos of the same person). According to the report, false positives are even more prevalent for Black people, people of East Asian descent, women, and older adults, thereby posing equal protection issues. These disparities in accuracy are due in part to algorithmic bias. Relatedly, photographs are often unable to accurately capture dark skinned people’s faces, which means that the initial inputs to the algorithm can themselves be unreliable. This poses serious problems in many contexts, but especially in criminal investigations, in which the stakes of an FRT misidentification are peoples’ lives and liberty.

The Commission recommends that Congress and agency chiefs enact better oversight and transparency rules. While EFF agrees with many of the Commission’s critiques, the technology poses grave threats to civil liberties, privacy, and security that require a more aggressive response. We will continue fighting to ban face recognition use by governments and to strictly regulate private use. You can join our About Face project to stop the technology from entering your community and encourage your representatives to ban federal use of FRT.