Questions raised about police use of facial recognition software
By
Karen Unland
A year after privacy commissioners raised the alarm about police use of Clearview AI's facial recognition technology, the Edmonton Police Service announced plans to use a different company's software to identify suspects by comparing still images of their faces to mugshots found in police databases in Edmonton and Calgary.
The EPS said on Feb. 1 that it has procured NeoFace Reveal, which is facial recognition software produced by NEC Corporation of America. It has been used by the Calgary Police Service since 2014.
Episode 165 of Speaking Municipally, Taproot's civic affairs podcast, raised some questions about police use of the technology. Co-host Mack Male cited a 2021 report from the Public Good Initiative at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, noting the risk that such technologies could amplify inequities within the system:
"In comparison (to) ClearviewAI, the NeoFace Reveal system was used to compare images to a mugshot database rather than a database scraped from the internet," the report says. "While this addresses some privacy concerns as the systems are used on lawfully obtained photos, there remains concerns about the use of the facial recognition technology as grounds for arrest or harassment, and about the nature of mugshot databases, grounded in over-policing of racialized minorities."
The podcast also cited a 2018 report from Big Brother Watch, which found through more than 50 freedom-of-information requests in the U.K. regarding a related NEC product called NeoFace Watch that "the overwhelming majority of the police's 'matches' using automated facial recognition to date have been inaccurate. On average, a staggering 95% of 'matches' wrongly identified innocent people."