Facial Recognition Company Says It Won't Sell To Law Enforcement, Knowing It'll Be Abused

from the taking-a-stand dept

We just recently wrote about employees at Amazon speaking out inside the company to complain about the company selling its face recognition tools (called: "Rekognition") to law enforcement. That resulted in the CEO of a maker of facial recognition software, Brian Brackeen, to publicly state that his company, Kairos, will not sell to law enforcement.

The full article is worth reading, but he notes that the technology will be abused and misused by law enforcement -- and often in a way that will lead to false arrests and murder:

Having the privilege of a comprehensive understanding of how the software works gives me a unique perspective that has shaped my positions about its uses. As a result, I (and my company) have come to believe that the use of commercial facial recognition in law enforcement or in government surveillance of any kind is wrong — and that it opens the door for gross misconduct by the morally corrupt.

To be truly effective, the algorithms powering facial recognition software require a massive amount of information. The more images of people of color it sees, the more likely it is to properly identify them. The problem is, existing software has not been exposed to enough images of people of color to be confidently relied upon to identify them.

And misidentification could lead to wrongful conviction, or far worse.

As he states later in the piece:

There is no place in America for facial recognition that supports false arrests and murder.

It's good to see this, and whether you support the police or not, we should appreciate this moment -- just as we should appreciate the people at Amazon who stood up and complained about this. Too often lately, the tech industry is getting slammed for not taking into account the impact of their technology in their rush to push forward innovation at any costs. I've always felt that that narrative is a bit exaggerated. I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs who really do think quite a lot about how their technology may impact the world -- both good and bad -- but it's good to see people in the industry speaking out publicly about how that might happen, and why they need to make sure not to oversell the technology in a way where it's likely to cause real harm.

Filed Under: brian brackeen, face recognition, law enforcement
Companies: kairos