Error-prone facial recognition leads to another wrongful arrest

The Detroit Police Department (DPD) is once again under scrutiny as a new lawsuit emerges, revealing that another innocent person has been wrongly arrested due to a flawed facial recognition match.

Porcha Woodruff, an African American woman who was eight months pregnant at the time, is the sixth individual to come forward and report being falsely accused of a crime because of the controversial technology utilised by law enforcement.

Woodruff was accused of robbery and...

7 August 2023 | Applications

European Parliament adopts AI Act position

The European Parliament has taken a significant step towards the regulation of artificial intelligence by voting to adopt its position for the upcoming AI Act with an overwhelming majority. 

The act aims to regulate AI based on its potential to cause harm and follows a risk-based approach, prohibiting applications that pose an unacceptable risk while imposing strict regulations for high-risk use cases.

The timing of AI regulation has been a subject of debate, but...

14 June 2023 | Artificial Intelligence

Italy’s facial recognition ban exempts law enforcement

Italy has banned the use of facial recognition, except for law enforcement purposes.

On Monday, the country’s Data Protection Authority (Garante per la protezione dei dati personali) issued official stays to two municipalities – the southern Italian city of Lecce and the Tuscan city of Arezzo – over their experiments with biometrics technologies.

The agency banned facial recognition systems using biometric data until a specific law governing its use is...

15 November 2022 | Applications

McDonald’s drive-thru AI bot may have broken privacy law

McDonald’s announced earlier this month that it was deploying an AI chatbot to handle its drive-thru orders, but it turns out it might break privacy law.

The chatbot is the product of a voice recognition company McDonald’s snapped up in 2019 called Apprente which is now known as McD Tech Labs.

McDonald’s deployed the chatbots to ten of its restaurants in Chicago, Illinois. And there lies the issue.

The state of Illinois has some of the strictest data...

11 June 2021 | Ethics & Society