Facial-recognition tool misfires

Amazon software confuses US lawmakers with suspected criminals, prompting civil liberties concerns.

Amazon.com’s facial recognition tools incorrectly identified US civil rights leader John Lewis and 27 other members of Congress as criminal suspects when a civil liberties organisation ran a test on the software.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California said its findings show that Amazon’s so-called Rekognition technology – already in use at lawenforcement agencies in Oregon and Orlando, Florida – is hampered by inaccuracies that disproportionately put people of colour at risk, and the findings should prompt regulators to halt ‘‘law enforcement use of face surveillance’’.

For its test, the ACLU of Northern California created a database of 25,000 publicly available arrest photos.

It then used Rekognition to compare that database against photos of every member of the US House and Senate.

Ultimately, Amazon’s technology flagged photos of 28 members of Congress as likely matches with the ACLU’s collection of mugshots.

Amazon questioned the ACLU’s methodology for its test, stressing that the threshold the watchdog set for what qualifies as a match – a ‘‘confidence,’’ or similarity rating, of 80 per cent – had been too low.

‘‘While 80 per cent confidence is an acceptable threshold for photos of hot dogs, chairs, animals, or other social media use cases, it wouldn’t be appropriate for identifying individuals with a reasonable level of certainty,’’ an Amazon spokeswoman said.

But the ACLU of Northern California countered that 80 per cent is the default setting on Amazon’s facial recognition tool. ‘‘Amazon should not be encouraging customers to use that confidence level for recognising human faces,’’ said Jacob Snow, a technology lawyer at the organisation.

Snow said the findings nonetheless affirm the organisation’s worst fears: that facialrecognition technologies are too unsophisticated to be deployed by law enforcement agents, where misidentification isn’t just a privacy concern – it ‘‘could cost people their freedom or even their lives’’.

The privacy watchdog called on Congress to halt the federal government’s use of the technology, though lawmakers have long struggled to write any federal privacy rules around facial recognition or other high-tech tools adopted by police, including location tracking technologies.

Amazon has broadly defended its technology, pointing to other uses of the Rekognition technology, from identifying celebrities at the royal wedding to locating lost children at busy amusement parks.