Facial recognition technology and policing: an unholy alliance?

Clearview, the company behind one of the most advanced models of facial recognition software, claims to have run more than a million searches on behalf of US police.

Hoan Ton-That, Clearview’s CEO, told the BBC that the company’s software is used by hundreds of police forces across the US. The estimate of a million searches comes from Clearview itself and has not been confirmed by police, but in what the BBC described as a “rare admission”, Miami police told the broadcaster it uses this software “for every type of crime”.

The Clearview system “allows a law enforcement customer to upload a photo of a face and find matches in a database of billions of images it has collected”, said the BBC.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

It then provides “links to where matching images appear online”, added the broadcaster, and “is considered one of the most powerful and accurate facial recognition companies in the world”.

Recent advances in AI have led to campaigners across the globe calling on governments and states to ban the use of facial recognition software and other forms of biometric identification.

The civil liberties group Big Brother Watch has been running a “stop facial recognition” campaign as the UK government works out how to regulate AI technologies. Twelve human rights groups also recently called on EU legislators to ban the use of facial recognition software by the police.

‘A perpetual police line-up’

Around the world, there are “almost no laws around the use of facial recognition by police” and critics argue that US forces’ use of Clearview puts everyone into a “perpetual police line-up”, said the BBC.

“Whenever they have a photo of a suspect, they will compare it to your face,” Matthew Guariglia, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the broadcaster. “It’s far too invasive.”

Late last year a report from the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, at the University of Cambridge, recommended that facial recognition technology be banned from use in streets, airports and any public spaces – “the very areas where police believe it would be most valuable”, said The Guardian. The study examined three deployments of facial recognition technology in UK policing, one by the Metropolitan Police and two by South Wales Police.

The report said: “We have shown how police use of facial recognition fails to incorporate many of the known practices for the safe and ethical use of large-scale data systems. This problem moves well beyond the concern of bias in facial recognition algorithms.”

‘Like a traditional tip-off’

But assistant chief of Miami police Armando Aguilar said his team used the Clearview system like a traditional tip-off, and that it had helped solve several murders. “We don’t make an arrest because an algorithm tells us to,” he said. “We either put that name in a photographic line-up or we go about solving the case through traditional means.”

Within UK law enforcement, facial recognition technology “is seen as potentially the next big crime-fighting innovation, on a par with the introduction of fingerprints”, said The Guardian.

“Facial recognition has its benefits,” wrote Asress Adimi Gikay, senior lecturer in AI at London’s Brunel University, for The Conversation. Additionally, with the UK and US having among the highest number of CCTV cameras in the world, “worrying about live facial recognition is inconsistent with our tolerance of all this surveillance”.

Instead of an outright ban of the technology, Gikay favours “a statutory law to clarify when this technology can be deployed”. Under the EU’s proposed law, facial recognition could only be deployed against those suspected of crimes carrying a maximum sentence of upwards of three years – “a reasonable cut-off”, he concluded.