Facial Recognition and privacy

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I posted this article to my twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook pages because it is an issue that has been a hot topic through the last decade.  While improvements to the technology have been great and false positives have decreased there is still gaping holes when it comes to minorities and women.  It is apart of the CCPA that went into effect at the beginning of this year and it is a point of contention in Washington State WaPA.  The federal government is also trying to figure out how to regulate this technology and what protections do Americans have if they have been falsely identified.  There is bipartisan support for "getting it right" but what does that exactly mean?

The CCPA discusses biometric data collection and states "...businesses that are covered by the law will need to inform consumers if they are collecting biometric information, be prepared to provide that information to consumers if they exercise a right to access request and delete that information if a consumer requests it."  The issue becomes how exactly does one delete facial recognition from video feeds or systems?  Can a criminal request "to be forgotten" or have that data removed from the system before they are apprehended?

That is just one angle to deal with and the false-positive rates are the other. We are seeing similar bias when it comes to machine learning as the bias' of the person feeding the data will eventually end up in the machine.  The technology in both realms is not there despite dramatic improvement to them and will still require human intervention to ensure that the machine/system is not misidentifying someone.  As some of the senator's state in the article that represents districts with minorities, they feel that their constituents could be wrongly identified and most would not have the ability to fight that case.  Despite all this, the federal government has introduced legislation this past Monday that would effectively regulate facial-recognition technology.

While I would like to have hope that our government will "get it right," I cannot help but feel special interest and big tech companies will find a way to push their own agendas or skirt whatever legislation is passed.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out both at the federal and state levels as states will follow California and pass their own version of privacy acts.

Resources:
https://www.clarip.com/data-privacy/california-privacy-law-facial-recognition/
https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-teach-artificial-intelligence-common-sense/
https://www.wired.com/story/tainted-data-teach-algorithms-wrong-lessons/