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Second tech company withdraws from LFR market over fears of racial bias if used as law enforcement tool.

The Met says its LFR system's accuracy is not affected by a person's ethnicity 

Date - 11th June 2020
By - Gary Mason

IBM has said it will no longer sell, research or develop facial recognition and analysis systems because of concerns over racial bias in the use of the technology.

IBM is the second big technology company to make the announcement in recent days. Amazon said yesterday it will ban police use of its facial recognition software for a year to allow US lawmakers time to devise legislation to regulate the technology.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna sent a letter to US Congress to announce that the company ‘has sunset’ its general purpose facial recognition and analysis software products.

In the letter he states: “IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency.

“We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies.

“Artificial Intelligence is a powerful tool that can help law enforcement keep citizens safe. But vendors and users of Al systems have a shared responsibility to ensure that Al is tested for bias, particularity when used in law enforcement, and that such bias testing is audited and reported.

“Finally, national policy also should encourage and advance uses of technology that bring greater transparency and accountability to policing, such as body cameras and modern data analytics techniques.”

Civil rights groups and Amazon's own employees have pushed the company to stop selling its technology, called Rekognition, to government agencies, saying that it could be used to invade privacy and target people of colour.

A number of US cities have banned the use of LFR by police departments and other government agencies, led by San Francisco last year.

In the UK the Metropolitan Police and South Wales Police continue to use live facial recognition systems for targeted operations.

The Met’s LFR system was procured from NEC and according to the force the system’s accuracy is not affected by a person’s ethnicity although it is slightly better at detecting men than women.

The force has also said LFR is a not linked to any other MPS system including CCTV and other databases according to the force.

It says Biometric information generated from non-hits using LFR are deleted immediately and any images detected by the system will be kept for one month.

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I don't particularly trust this technology anyway. 

We're already verging on a surveillance state as it is, it's about time we clawed back some individual rights and responsibilities from the ever nannying state that is Britain.