blacks and facial recognition
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Black Man Files Lawsuit After Being Jailed Due to Error in Facial Recognition Technology
A Black man in New Jersey has filed a lawsuit against police and county prosecutors after a misidentification by facial recognition technology resulted in him being jailed for 10 days. According to NBC News, 33-year-old Nijer Parks went to Woodbridge police headquarters on Feb. 5 after finding out from his grandmother that a warrant was…
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Massachusetts Legislators Vote to Ban Police From Using Facial Recognition Technology
Lawmakers in Massachusetts have taken the rare step back from our inevitable, Minority Report-lite future by voting to ban police departments from using facial recognition technology. According to TechCrunch, the ban was part of an overall police reform bill that also bans police from using chokeholds, rubber bullets, limits the use of chemical agents such…
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Twitter to Investigate Why Its Picture Cropping Algorithm Is Apparently Racist
Considering how little diversity is present in Silicon Valley, I’m never terribly surprised when some arbitrary feature on a tech platform turns out to have a racial bias. I mean, if white people aren’t thinking about how their racial bias affects people in the real world, I doubt they’re thinking about how it affects cropping…
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Federal Study Confirms Racial Bias in Facial-Recognition Systems. Which, Yeah, We Know
A federal study released Thursday shows that facial recognition technology used by law enforcement misidentified people of color more often than white people. In other news, water is indeed wet. The Washington Post reports that a study conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal lab that develops standards for emerging technology,…
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Not Only Does Facial Recognition Software Often Get Racial ID Wrong, a New Study Finds It Misgenders Trans and Nonbinary Folks Almost All the Time
Nonbinary and transgender identities are increasingly being accepted and normalized throughout society, but not when it comes to high-tech facial recognition software developed by some of the largest tech firms in the world. According to Forbes, a recent study by the University of Colorado, Boulder, found that when it comes to transgender and nonbinary people,…
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Google Trolls BET Awards and the Homeless to (Shadily) Get Dark-Skinned Faces for Pixel 4 Technology
Tech behemoth and Big Brother is Watching purveyor Google—through a third party company—dispatched workers to blackety-black events like the 2019 BET Awards in Los Angeles to get darker-skinned faces for a facial recognition database, but often used skeevy and immoral tactics to do so, according to an explosive report by the New York Daily News.…