Essex Police Pauses Use Of Live Facial Recognition Cameras Due To Racial Bias Concerns
Essex Police has suspended the use of live facial recognition (LFR) cameras this week, following a study that found the technology was significantly more likely to identify black people than individuals from other ethnic groups.
University of Cambridge researchers found the LFR system was “statistically significantly more likely” to correctly match black people on a watchlist than other ethnicities, raising fundamental questions about fairness.
So while the system is correctly identifying people on watchlists, it apparently has a much easier time identifying black people on said watchlists, which the researchers outlined as a “bias in the positive identification rate.”
The Information Commissioner’s Office announced the pausing of the technology and warned other forces of the “real risk of unfairness” if similar technologies are not routinely tested for discriminatory outcomes.
Essex Police are now working with their software provider to update the algorithm and will restart the cameras once the issue has been corrected.
This comes as the UK government plans a 5x increase in the number of LFR vans available to police forces across England and Wales.
Privacy advocates, such as Big Brother Watch, have labeled the situation a “fiasco,” arguing that millions of people had their faces scanned by the biased and untested technology before the pause was implemented.
It is a tricky one really. Obviously it’s a great that the technology is correctly identifying wanted criminals, but it’s not ideal that it’s so much better at identifying black criminals than criminals from any other background.
Apparently one of the possible reasons for the issue was “overtraining of the algorithm on the faces of black people.” Which is a bit weird because surely the only faces it should be trained on is the database of criminals and wanted suspects who have had their mugshots taken. Why would it be trained on random people, black or otherwise?
I suppose they want the technology to be good at detecting all people, not just criminals. I can’t see how that could possibly be open to abuse, can you? Minority Report, here we come.
For the chilling moment a pervert was caught on CCTV targeting a teenage girl in a changing room at a leisure centre in Swansea, click HERE.
