facial recognition technology
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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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Facial Recognition Results in Detroit Man Being Arrested for a Crime He Didn't Commit
The long, arduous slog that’s been 2020 has had me reflecting on many things. One of those things has been how extensively movies and shows about cops lie to us. We’re repeatedly inundated with this idea that cops are moral arbiters who, operate like a well-oiled machine, and utilize the most cutting edge technology to…
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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.…
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People Are Upset Because Rashida Tlaib Said White People Can’t Distinguish Black Faces. Science Says She’s Right
Right-wing outlets and people who don’t season their wings right are up in arms after a Democratic congresswoman made a statement based on nothing but data, facts and peer-reviewed scientific research. According to the Detroit News, on Monday, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) visited Detroit’s “Real-Time Crime” center, which uses cameras and computer software equipped with…
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Whodunit? As Feds Scan DMV Records Using Facial Recognition Software and More Cities Use the Technology, Racial Bias Could Be a Problem
When you go to your local DMV office and stand in front of the camera to take as decent a photo as possible, you probably aren’t thinking about the possibility that said photo will come up in a facial-recognition search used by government agencies. If this is a concern you never had before, you should…
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Citing Fears of Worsening Racial Bias, San Francisco Votes to Ban Police Use of Facial Recognition Technology
No other city in the U.S. is as closely associated with technological advancements than San Francisco, which, for the most part, has embraced both tech companies and their services in civic life. But on Tuesday, San Francisco passed an ordinance that would ban the use of one very specific technology—facial recognition—by local police departments, making…
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Facial-Recognition Technology Affects African Americans More Often
A Georgetown University think tank and the American Civil Liberties Union, along with 52 other civil liberties organizations, are urging the U.S. Department of Justice to look into the way federal, state and local law-enforcement agencies use face-recognition technology, which they say is having a “disparate impact on communities of color.” On Tuesday the Georgetown…