No Hiding Your Face?

• Author: Bubar, Joe
• Position: Face recognition technology in solving crimes

More police departments are using facial recognition to help solve crimes. But as the use of the technology grows, so do privacy concerns.

It was all caught on camera. In 2017, a woman entered a store in Cornelius, Oregon, stashed a $130 pair of boots in her purse, and walked out.

The Washington County Sheriff's Office uploaded images of her face that had been captured by the security cameras to the office's newest crime-solving tool: a facial recognition system. Within seconds, the system came up with a digital lineup of potential matches. When a deputy spoke to one of these women the next day, she confessed to the crime and was charged with theft. The case, which in the past might never have been cracked, was solved in just a day.

That's just one of many recent examples of police departments employing facial recognition to help solve crimes, ranging from shoplifting to assaults and mass shootings.

But the growing use of this technology is fueling a heated debate. While some are calling it a breakthrough in policing, civil liberties advocates see it differently. They say the technology isn't always accurate and could lead to wrongful arrests, especially of people of color. They also argue that the use of facial recognition is an invasion of privacy, and they fear it could be used for mass surveillance, allowing the police and government agencies to secretly monitor people.

"This is the most pervasive and risky surveillance technology of the 21st century," says Alvaro Bedoya, director of Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology (C.P.T.).

Those concerns led San Francisco last spring to become the first U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition by the police and other city agencies. The move was largely precautionary, since San Francisco's police department hadn't used facial recognition. But it could spark similar legislation elsewhere; other cities are already considering bans.

However, many people argue that facial recognition is a powerful and efficient tool for keeping people safe. It could also be used for finding missing people. Instead of banning the technology, some experts say cities should craft regulations on how it's used. "It is ridiculous to deny the value of this technology in securing airports and border installations," says Jonathan Hirley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "It is hard to deny that there is a public safety value to this technology."

A Breakthrough in Policing?

You're probably already familiar with facial recognition. It's used to tag friends on Facebook, unlock iPhones, and add filters on Snapchat.

It's becoming increasingly common in police departments too. Although it's difficult to say exactly how many use the technology, a 2016 C.P.T. study found that at least a quarter of state and local police departments have the ability to run facial recognition searches.

Typically, police upload an image of someone--which could come from a phone or any of the numerous cameras posted on buildings, on street corners, or in businesses and stores that we pass by each day--to a computer with facial recognition software. The software scans the image and compares it to a database of known people, such as a catalogue of mug shots from previous arrests. Thirty-one states also allow police to access driver's license photos, according to the C.P.T. study (see "How Facial Recognition Works," facing page).

Police say the technology, which can search through databases of millions of people in mere seconds, saves them valuable time. In New York City alone, it led to nearly 1,000 arrests in 2018. In other parts of the country, it's helped lead to the arrest of a trio of suspected jewel thieves, people who the authorities said were trying to enter the U.S. under fake names, and a man who killed five people in a mass shooting at the offices of a Maryland newspaper in 2018.

Last December, police in Pennsylvania used the technology to nab a man who they say had assaulted a 15-year-old back in 2016. "If it wasn't for facial recognition, it would still be an open case," says Michael Zinn, an officer in York, Pennsylvania.

Biases & Mass Surveillance?

However, there are concerns about the technology's accuracy. A recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that the facial recognition systems created by I.B.M., Microsoft, and Amazon were much better at identifying the gender of white men's faces than that of darker-skinned or female faces.

Although we often think of computers as objective, it's actually not uncommon for people's biases to creep into technology. In this case, experts say, the people who trained the systems typically used databases that contained more white people than people of color. As a result of these flaws, some people worry that African Americans, women, and others might be wrongly identified and arrested.

However, police departments say that instead of relying on facial recognition as...