The Capability – Australia’s facial recognition tech & how accurate it might be

1. IBM

American multinational tech company IBM decided to pull out of the facial recognition market and calls for national dialogue. IBM Chief Arvind Krishna, in a public letter sent to Congress on June 8th 2020, explained the decision to back out of the business. The letter also mentioned an intention to work with Congress in the pursuit of racial equality and justice. The company would like to work with Congress on policy reforms that focus on the responsible use of facial recognition technology. IBM also said that it firmly opposes and will not accept the use of facial recognition technology offered by other vendors for mass surveillance, violation of basic human rights or freedom and racial profiling. It says that it is not consistent with their values and principles of trust and transparency.

2. Microsoft

On 11th June, Microsoft also took the step of backing off from selling its facial recognition product to law enforcement, until there are federal laws in place regulating the technology. An MIT Media Lab study identified racial and gender bias in facial recognition technology built by IBM, Microsoft and a Chinese tech company Megvii. In a dataset of 1270 faces, the error rate was 1% for light-skinned men, 7% in lighter-skinned women, 12% for dark-skinned men and 35% in dark-skinned women [2]. Shortly after the study was released, IBM and Microsoft said that the companies would improve their software.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft bans sale of facial recognition technology to the U.S. police department

For more updates and latest tech news, keep reading iTMunch

3. Amazon

Amazon has created its own facial recognition system called the “Rekognition”. The technology was launched in 2016 as a part of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division. Realising the negative applications of the software, Amazon put a one-year moratorium on selling it to the police departments. Though experts criticized Amazon for giving a time limit, especially when congressional action might not take place in a year. Amazon’s Rekognition is also prone to errors. A research conducted by ACLU found the software incorrectly matched faces of 28 lawmakers with mugshots [3]. Another study conducted by MIT Media Lab proved Rekognition rightly identified the gender of lighter-skinned men, but mistook women for men 19% of the time and mistook dark-skinned women for men 31% of the time [4].

Though tech companies are refraining from selling their facial matching products to law enforcement to promote gender and racial equality, there is a company that has made facial recognition technology especially for law enforcement – Clearview AI.

About Clearview AI

Clearview AI is an American facial recognition tech company that has developed a system that basically works like an image search engine. The company sells this technology to federal agencies and law enforcement along with some private companies. Clearview AI has been relentlessly mining pictures online to create a vast database. It now has a database of 3 billion photos (possibly more). The company claims to have scraped it (without permission, it seems) from Facebook, Google, Venmo, Twitter, YouTube and other sources. How does it work? Someone takes a picture of a person, uploads it on Clearview AI’s app and gets to see every public photo available of that person along with links of the photo’s source. 

Earlier this year, tech giants Facebook, Google and YouTube sent cease-and-desist letters to Clearview AI. Twitter and LinkedIn also took similar actions against the company. But the CEO, in an interview with CBS, defended his company and its practices by saying it is his First Amendment right to collect public photos. The Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That also compared his practices to what Google and its search engines do. In the interview with Errol Barnett, Ton-That said, “Google can pull in information from all different websites. If this is public and could be inside Google search engine, it can be inside ours as well”. 

As said by The New York Times, the system goes far beyond anything ever created by the Silicon Valley giants or US government. Today, about 600 law enforcement agencies are using Clearview according to the company. The NY Times also analysed the code underlying its app and found that its built allows pairing with augmented reality glasses. This means the tool could potentially identify people it saw in real-time. It could be used to identify protestors or even a stranger on a train, revealing a lot more than just their name. Friends, family, co-workers, school and college is just the surface information one can get from the tool. The controversial company also readily offers free trials to “active law enforcement personnel”. It remains unclear how the company verifies this beyond requiring a government email ID.

What makes the technology problematic, even scary, is that their facial recognition tool has been made available to a handful of private companies as well, apart from the law enforcement. What’s scarier is that the company has not been vetted by any independent expert, so the accuracy of its technology remains unclear. 

Recent reports indicate that the client list of Clearview AI also includes Walmart, Best Buy, Macy’s and the NBA. However, Ton-That said this May that the company will no longer sell its product to non-law enforcement entities and private companies. It also terminated its existing contracts, law enforcement or otherwise, in the state of Illinois. 

Recently, a security lapse at Clearview AI that unlocked its source code along with its cloud storage credentials and a set of secret keys. The copy of its apps was also made publically accessible. On April 17th, TechCrunch reported that this exposed base of information was discovered by the CSO of SpiderSilk, Mossab Hussein. Hussein found that this ‘leaked’ information was enough for anyone to register as a new user and access the database.

Apart from Clearview and other tech giants, it seems as though there could be several surveillance tools police can access. It is difficult, rather impossible for the general public to determine what surveillance systems are used by police departments. Law enforcement and tech companies are usually secretive about these products, which are by no means limited to only facial recognition. In the age of information, the right to privacy is a privilege and it seems like nobody has that privilege anymore.