Misidentification by a witness or law enforcement officer can also result in a false arrest.that people are generally bad at recognizing other people they don’t know and especially bad at recognizing people of a different race. Photo quality and the time difference between a probe photo and a photo in a database can also influence outcomes.
The FBI has been under pressure from government and lawmakers to better protect the rights of US residents against the power of face recognition for years. The GAO began calling for the FBI to assess the accuracy and privacy implications of its in-house face recognition software in 2016.. In 2022, a congressional committee instructed the Department of Justice to create an ethical-use-of-face-recognition policy, but the agency has yet to put such a policy into practice. That same year, President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing the department to commission a National Academy of Sciences study of face recognition's impact on privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.
Sneha Revanur, founder of Encode Justice, a youth nonprofit that wants a moratorium on face recognition use by law enforcement, says the technology can be overlooked amid recent excitement andabout generative AI such as ChatGPT. “It’s critical that we don’t leave behind unfinished business around issues like face recognition,” she says.