Companies Using Facial Recognition Need to Follow Ethical Standards: Lawmakers
January 18, 2020
Facial recognition technology, unbeknownst to citizens, is used in a variety of public settings, but some U.S. lawmakers say that the technology should not be deployed freely until security, privacy, and accuracy concerns can be mitigated and civil liberties guaranteed.
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing on the use of facial recognition (FR) technology on Wednesday, the third in a three-part series. The hearings are an effort to understand the scope of how private and public companies are using this technology, so these companies can be held accountable to ethical standards.
The use of facial recognition technology is increasing. It can be found in home security systems, social media sites, sports arenas, and elsewhere for advertising, security, access, photo, and video data identification, and accessibility.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued (pdf) a report in December analyzing private facial recognition systems companies. The report found that “across demographics, false positives rates often vary by factors of 10 to beyond 100 times,” and that Africans and Asians were more often misidentified.
Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-Wash.) expressed concern that consumers are unaware of the security issues that facial recognition on their cellphone poses. She asked the panel if there were any means by which consumers could confirm that these cellphone manufacturers are storing their biometric or other data on their servers.
Meredith Whittaker (pdf), Co-Founder of the AI Now Institute at New York University said that this technology “is hidden behind trade secrecy.” She added: “This is a corporate technology that is not open for scrutiny and auditing by external experts. I think it’s notable that while NIST reviewed 189 algorithms for their latest report, Amazon refused to submit their recognition algorithm to NIST, and they claimed they couldn’t modify it to meet NIST standards.”
Whittaker expressed suspicion about the multibillion-dollar company’s non-compliance with the NIST research and pointed to their global reach and innovations. She said whatever the reason for not disclosing information about their facial recognition technology, “we have to trust these companies, but we don’t have many options to say no or to scrutinize the claims they make.”
Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.) introduced HR153, which addresses the need for the development of guidelines for the ethical development of transparency and ethics in the AI systems processes, and the implications of it. Lawrence said that currently there are no checks on how and when the technology is used, and what companies are doing with the data.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/u-s-congress-time-to-hold-companies-that-use-facial-recognition-to-ethical-standards_3207929.html