Home » About » Newsletters » January 2002
"ACLU Report Reveals Poor Performance of Face Recognition Technology"
Facial recognition technology on the streets of Tampa's Ybor City is an overhyped failure that has been seemingly abandoned by police officials, according to a report released Jan. 3 by the American Civil Liberties Union.
System logs obtained by the ACLU through Florida's open-records law show that the system never identified even a single individual contained in the department's database of photographs. And in response to the ACLU's queries about the small number of system logs, the department has acknowledged that the software ? originally deployed last June, 2001 ? has not been actively used since August.
"Tampa's off-again, on-again use of face-recognition software reminds us that public officials should not slavishly embrace whatever latest fad in surveillance technology comes along," said Howard Simon, Executive Director of the ACLU of Florida, which made the records request last August.
The logs obtained by the ACLU also indicate that the system made many false matches between people photographed by police video cameras as they walked the streets of Tampa's Ybor City entertainment district and photographs in the department's database of criminals, sex offenders, and runaways. The system made what were to human observers obvious errors, such as matching male and female subjects and subjects with significant differences in age or weight.
Tampa police officials claim that their discontinuation of the system was due to disruptions caused by police redistricting and that they plan to resume operation in the near future. The ACLU expressed skepticism that redistricting was what really led Tampa to abandon the face recognition system.
Several government agencies have already abandoned facial-recognition systems after finding they did not work as advertised, including the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which experimented with using the technology to identify people in cars at the Mexico-U.S. border. Also, more controlled studies of face recognition software ? by the federal government's National Institute of Standards and Technology and by the Defense Department ? have found levels of ineffectiveness similar to those in Tampa.
