Amazon will continue to ban police from using its facial recognition AI

Amazon will extend a ban it enacted last year on the use of its facial recognition for law enforcement purposes.

The web giant’s Rekognition service is one of the most powerful facial recognition tools available. Last year, Amazon signed a one-year moratorium that banned its use by police departments following a string of cases where facial recognition services – from various providers – were found to be inaccurate and/or misused by law enforcement.

Amazon has now...

24 May 2021 | Amazon

ACLU joins over 50 groups in calling for Homeland Security to halt use of Clearview AI

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has joined over 50 other rights and advocacy groups in calling for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to halt the use of Clearview AI’s controversial facial recognition system.

In a letter (PDF) addressed to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the signatories wrote: “The undersigned organizations have serious concerns about the federal government’s use of facial recognition technology provided by private company Clearview AI. We...

20 April 2021 | Ethics & Society

EU regulation sets fines of €20M or up to 4% of turnover for AI misuse

A leaked draft of EU regulation around the use of AI sets hefty fines of up to €20 million or four percent of global turnover (whichever is greater.)

The regulation (PDF) was first reported by Politico and is expected to be announced next week on April 21st.

In the draft, the legislation’s authors wrote:

“Some of the uses and applications of artificial intelligence may generate risks and cause harm to interests and rights that are protected by Union law....

14 April 2021 | Ethics & Society

Affectiva receives six new patents for using AI to analyse vehicle occupants

Human perception AI pioneer Affectiva has been granted six patents for detecting the awareness and emotions of vehicle occupants.

Affectiva Automotive AI combines deep learning with computer vision – using in-vehicle cameras – to analyse the states of the driver and other vehicle occupants in a cabin in real-time.

Dr Rana el Kaliouby, Co-Founder and CEO of Affectiva, said:

“Over the last decade, Affectiva has continuously pursued new patents as we have...

23 March 2021 | Face Recognition

Police use of Clearview AI’s facial recognition increased 26% after Capitol raid

Clearview AI reports that police use of the company’s highly-controversial facial recognition system jumped 26 percent following the raid on the Capitol.

The facial recognition system relies on scraping the data of people from across the web without their explicit consent, a practice which has naturally raised some eyebrows—including the ACLU’s which called it a “nightmare scenario” for privacy.

Around three billion images are said to have been scraped for...

11 January 2021 | Face Recognition

Researchers create AI bot to protect the identities of BLM protesters

Researchers from Stanford have created an AI-powered bot to automatically cover up the faces of Black Lives Matter protesters in photos.

Everyone should have the right to protest. And, if done legally, to do so without fear of having things like their future job prospects ruined because they've been snapped at a demonstration – from which a select few may have gone on to do criminal acts such as arson and looting.

With images from the protests being widely shared on...

29 July 2020 | Face Recognition

UK and Australia launch joint probe into Clearview AI’s mass data scraping

The UK and Australia have launched a joint probe into the controversial “data scraping” practices of Clearview AI.

Clearview AI has repeatedly made headlines, and rarely for good reason. The company’s facial recognition technology is impressive but relies on scraping billions of people’s data from across the web.

“Common law has never recognised a right to privacy for your face,” Clearview AI lawyer Tor Ekeland argued recently.

Regulators in the UK...

10 July 2020 | Ethics & Society

Detroit Police chief says AI face recognition doesn’t work ‘96% of the time’

Detroit Police chief James Craig has acknowledged that AI-powered face recognition doesn’t work the vast majority of times.

“If we would use the software only [for subject identification], we would not solve the case 95-97 percent of the time,” Craig said. “If we were just to use the technology by itself to identify someone, I would say 96 percent of the time it would misidentify.”

Craig’s comments arrive just days after the ACLU (American Civil Liberties...

30 June 2020 | Ethics & Society

The ACLU uncovers the first known wrongful arrest due to AI error

The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) has forced the police to acknowledge a wrongful arrest due to an erroneous algorithm.

While it’s been suspected that documented racial bias with facial recognition algorithms has led to false arrests, it’s been difficult to prove.

On Wednesday, the ACLU lodged a complaint against the Detroit police after black male Robert Williams was arrested on his front lawn “as his wife Melissa looked on and as his daughters wept from...

25 June 2020 | Face Recognition

Over 1,000 researchers sign letter opposing ‘crime predicting’ AI

More than 1,000 researchers, academics, and experts have signed an open letter opposing the use of AI to predict crime.

Anyone who has watched the sci-fi classic Minority Report will be concerned about attempts to predict crime before it happens. In an ideal scenario, crime prediction could help determine where to allocate police resources – but the reality will be very different.

The researchers are speaking out ahead of an imminent publication titled ‘A Deep Neural...

24 June 2020 | Ethics & Society