Passport photo-checking technology biased against black women
FACIAL recognition technology used by the Home Office to check passports is twice as likely to reject photos of black women as white men, an investigation has found.
Dark-skinned women were told their pictures were of poor quality 22 per cent of the time, compared with just 9 per cent for light-skinned men. For black men it was 15 per cent and it was 14 per cent for white women.
The technology is used by the Home Office as part of the online application process to determine whether photographs are appropriate for a passport after automatically checking them against a database of faces. However, flaws in the technology and its algorithms mean that it can flag black people’s lips as an open mouth and rejects them. In other cases, it has determined eyes were closed when they were not.
Trials of the technology found it was unable to recognise some ethnic groups’ faces but Home Office officials still pressed ahead with its use in 2016, according to documents obtained under Freedom of Information laws. The investigation by the BBC fed more than 1,000 photographs of politicians from across the world into the online checker to reveal that, at the extremes, photos of women with the darkest skin were four times more likely to be graded poor quality than women with the lightest skin. Elaine Owusu, 22, a black student from London, claimed it was evidence of systemic racism after she was wrongly told her mouth looked open each time she uploaded five different photos to the Government website.
She said she managed to get a photo approved after challenging the website’s verdict. “If the algorithm can’t read my lips, it’s a problem with the system, and not with me,” she said. The Home Office said the tool helped users get their passports quickly. “The indicative check [helps] our customers to submit a photo that is right the first time,” said a spokesman.
“Over nine million people have used this service and our systems are improving. We will continue to develop and evaluate our systems with the objective of making applying for a passport as simple as possible for all.”