
Many Facial-Recognition Systems Are Biased, Says U.S. Study - furcyd
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/technology/facial-recognition-bias.html
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danso
Great to see a federal study of this. I’m prone to be pessimist and to think
that some level of face-recognition will be used in government services — I
mean, technically it already is, since photo ID is all but mandated for air
travel.

But a disparity of 10 to 100x for different racial groups would seem to make
face-recognition a non-starter in the U.S., for everyday use by police for
something like stop and frisk. But the pessimist in me thinks that the racial
gap in algorithmic performance currently exist only because there hasn’t been
enough profit motive to fix it, and if there’s the potential for a massive
federal contract, there will be firms enthusiastic and capable of improving
state of the art.

