<story><title>Facial recognition database used by FBI is out of control</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/27/us-facial-recognition-database-fbi-drivers-licenses-passports</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Eyas</author><text>&amp;gt; Database contains photos of half of US adults without consent, and algorithm is wrong nearly 15% of time and is more likely to misidentify black people&lt;p&gt;I think technology is often a very effective way to describe what &amp;quot;systemic racism&amp;quot; is.&lt;p&gt;Racism propagates easily, and race-blind &amp;#x2F; race-agnostic &amp;#x2F; race-indifferent behavior does not combat it or counteract it.&lt;p&gt;Imagine a majority-white tech team, largely color-blind, yet still (by virtue of economic and geographic segregation) in a mostly white-centric bubble. The training set might be largely white. If some preprocessing or feature-detection is taking place on the raw images, it might be tracking features that could have higher variability among white people while overlooking other features.&lt;p&gt;If you don&amp;#x27;t know to go out of your way to check for, include tests, and give thought to mitigating imbalances caused by race (because you &amp;quot;see no race&amp;quot;) then you allow this problem to propagate. In the case of computer vision, you will inherit the &amp;quot;racism&amp;quot; of every library you import from.&lt;p&gt;This reminds me of gender biased found in Word2vec[1]. It is hard to accuse the dataset of being sexist, especially when viewing it as a reflection of language in news article. Yet, people using Word2vec use it as a representative of language, not a representative of language in news, with all the baggage in today&amp;#x27;s (and past) culture. As a result, sexism can propagate, autocomplete and query suggestions might be biased. Then spending habits might be biased, etc.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  [1]: https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&amp;#x2F;s&amp;#x2F;602025&amp;#x2F;how-vector-space-mathematics-reveals-the-hidden-sexism-in-language&amp;#x2F;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Facial recognition database used by FBI is out of control</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/27/us-facial-recognition-database-fbi-drivers-licenses-passports</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>abandonliberty</author><text>I wrote a class paper about the threat to privacy&amp;#x2F;freedom from data mining and advanced algorithms in 2003.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately the risks they highlight exist without facial recognition.  It&amp;#x27;s interesting to see facial recognition as a point of debate because the battle has been largely lost.&lt;p&gt;The quantity and intimacy of personal data already captured is much more damaging. Amazon figured out a teen girl was pregnant in 2012 [0].  IMO face recognition isn&amp;#x27;t even the most invasive modern technology.   Sure it helps close the loop on a few Luddites but most of us willingly handed over the keys to our lives long ago.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.forbes.com&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;kashmirhill&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;16&amp;#x2F;how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did&amp;#x2F;#269d6b256668&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.forbes.com&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;kashmirhill&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;16&amp;#x2F;how-targ...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>