Facial recognition has been a hot topic for a long time now. But with technological advances now pushing the technology into the public sphere more than ever, it has started to attract even more heat in the form of controversy. Police use of the technology in particular has become the subject of a contentious debate…
“Amazon offers the example of Rekognition technology being used to crack a sex trafficking case by identifying 20 victims and helping to send the perpetrator to prison…” Amazon is trying to put its own spin on its sale of facial recognition technology to police with a new case study put together by Marinus Analytics. It…
“In its memo, the OPD said that the next trial would operate similarly to the first, in which seven police officers volunteered to have their faces scanned by the system.” The Orlando Police Department will continue to test facial recognition technology from Amazon despite the recent outcry from privacy and civil rights advocates over the…
South Korea’s independent human rights agency has weighed in on a newly proposed law that would allow government authorities to collect the fingerprints of children aged four and under without parental consent, deeming it unconstitutional. As The Korea Times reports, the law was drafted with the aim of helping police to track down missing children.…
Just a month after the ACLU made Amazon’s sale of facial recognition technology to government authorities a matter of public debate, a group of prominent Amazon shareholders are calling on the company to halt such business activities, at least until the proper oversight is put in place. The controversy concerns Rekognition, Amazon’s machine vision solution,…
Police authorities in the UK are being challenged over their use of public surveillance systems based on facial recognition technology. An organization called Big Brother Watch, working with politician Baroness Jenny Jones, has written letters to the heads of the Home Office and London’s Metropolitan Police Service asking them to either halt the use of…
The Unique Identification Authority of India has delayed its implementation of facial recognition support in Aadhaar, the biometric national ID program it oversees. The support for facial recognition was first announced near the start of this year. It’s aimed at facilitating biometric authentication in ‘fusion mode’ – that is, when both a fingerprint scan and…
Facebook’s legal team made a Hail Mary last week to delay its biometric class action lawsuit, and it has now scored a touchdown: A panel of judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to review whether the lawsuit really should qualify for class action status. The decision essentially pauses the judicial proceedings…
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation is pushing back against the ACLU’s efforts to get Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition technology to government organizations. The outcry began about a week ago, when the ACLU published information concerning multiple police agencies’ use of Rekognition, a machine learning, computer vision system that runs on Amazon…
“Responding to the report, the Orlando Police Department’s chief, John Mina, held a press conference at which he insisted that his department was only testing the technology, with seven officers having volunteered to have their faces tracked through OPD cameras.” Amazon and the Orlando Police Department are playing down the use of facial recognition technology…
The American Civil Liberties Union is urging Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition system to government authorities, warning that it threatens privacy and civil liberties and empowers a growing surveillance state. The system, Rekognition, was first announced toward the end of 2016, and is available through Amazon Web Services. Based on machine learning technology,…
Some of the biometric identification technologies in play around the world were secretly developed in North Korea, according to a new report from the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Laying out some of the key findings in an article for the Daily Beast, researcher Andrea Berger frames the issue primarily as one of sanctions…
The latest major lawsuit under Illinois’ biometric privacy law could be taking shape. The lawsuit has been filed by an employee of Scrub, Inc., a Chicago-based cleaning company, and revolves around the company’s use of a fingerprint-based punch clock. According to a report from Cook County Record, the plaintiff, Shavonne Norman, says that Scrub, Inc. did…
For good or for ill, governments around the world have sought to track citizens and non-citizens alike throughout history. And for good or ill, biometric technology has emerged to make such surveillance easier and more effective. Particularly over the last several years, with the advent of facial recognition that can scan hours and hours of…
Facebook is going to have to face a class action lawsuit over the alleged misuse of its facial recognition technology, a US District judge has ruled. The legal challenge is years old at this point, having taken shape in the spring of 2015. It revolves around Facebook’s ‘tag suggestions’ feature, which uses face biometrics to…
In the wake of another study pointing to demographic bias in commercial facial recognition technologies, SensibleVision is highlighting its 3DVerify solution, which the company says shows no such bias. The latest study comes by way of MIT and Stanford University. Assessing three commercially available facial recognition systems, researchers found significant differences in accuracy between demographic…
The Acting Commissioner of the US Customs and Border Protection agency has taken the opportunity of a concerned inquiry from two US senators to clarify the CBP’s actions with respect to biometric border screening. The letter, co-signed by Democrat Edward Markey and Republican Mike Lee, was framed as a request for further information as the…
Administrators at one of Australia’s most high-profile sports venues are considering implementing security based on automated facial recognition, but may have a bit of a tug-of-war with government authorities over the matter. The plans came to light during a parliamentary counterterrorism inquiry, where VenuesWest CEO David Etherton suggested that the firm is evaluating the possibility…
The Unique Identification Authority of India is urgently reminding government service providers that they are obligated to serve citizens even when those citizens aren’t able to present credentials with Aadhaar, the national biometric ID program that the UIDAI administrates. In a public statement, the UIDAI says it has taken note of “media reports that some…