![]() ![]() Only five states have any laws that touch on how law enforcement can use facial recognition, and none of them take on more than one aspect of the issue, the report found. Many of the various local and state police departments that have access to these databases have few checks on how they use them. ![]() “Never before has federal law enforcement created a biometric database-or network of databases-that is primarily made up of law-abiding Americans,” the report says. According to the report, 80 percent of the photos that appear in the FBI’s facial-recognition network are of non-criminals. If the surveillance footage is good enough, the recognition algorithm can then determine the probability that the face in the photo is the same as the one in John’s driver's license portrait.įor it to be possible to identify people this way requires importing many millions of ID photos of innocent people into lookup databases. ![]() If a police agency wants to know that the guy caught holding up a bank in a surveillance photo is John Doe, it needs to already have a photo of John on file. What’s more, in order for a facial-recognition system to work, there needs to be a database for it to check against. (This is true also for technologies that track a smartphone’s location, for example.) Courts haven’t determined whether facial recognition constitutes a “search,” which would limit its use under the Fourth Amendment, so many departments use it on the public indiscriminately. Some details about the FBI’s use of facial scanning were previously known, but the scale of local and state law-enforcement involvement is only now starting to come to light.įacial recognition is fundamentally different from other types of searches, the authors contend-and not just because it makes it easy for police to track people by their physical features, rather than by keeping an eye on their possessions and technology, like a smartphone, a house, or a car.įor one, it allows officers to track large groups of people who aren’t necessarily suspected of committing a crime. The study’s authors-Clare Garvie, Alvaro Bedoya, and Jonathan Frankle-attempted to fill in large gaps in public knowledge about how facial-recognition technology is used, and the existence of policies that constrain how police departments can use it. It details the results of a year-long investigation that drew upon more than 15,000 pages of records obtained through more than 100 freedom-of-information requests. These findings were published Tuesday in a report from Georgetown Law’s Center for Privacy and Technology. Altogether, more than 117 million American adults are subject to face-scanning systems. Some departments only use facial-recognition to confirm the identity of a suspect who’s been detained others continuously analyze footage from surveillance cameras to determine exactly who is walking by at any particular moment. states can use facial-recognition software to compare surveillance images with databases of ID photos or mugshots. Police departments in nearly half of U.S. If you’re reading this in the United States, there’s a 50 percent chance that a photo of your face is in at least one database used in police facial-recognition systems.
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