The Milwaukee Police Department and County Sheriff’s Office may acquire facial recognition technology licenses from software developer Biometrica Systems Inc. In exchange, the Nevada tech company would receive 2.5 million mugshots and Milwaukee County Jail records.
The Milwaukee Equal Rights Commision, ACLU of Wisconsin, and Milwaukee Turners oppose the trade. In June, the County Board asked the Sheriff's Office to adopt a civil rights protection policy around facial recognition technology. MPD is still considering the trade but the department says nothing is finalized yet.
Dr. Alan Rubel is the director of UW-Madison's Information School, where he teaches classes on tech ethics and policy. He joins WUWM digital producer and All Things Considered host Graham Thomas to discuss the trade. He starts by explaining the basics of FRT.
"Facial recognition technology allows any user of it to take a data set of known faces of mapped facial features and plug in new data — that is, a new picture of of a person — and check it against that database in order to try to determine the identity of that person," he says.
Potential threats to free expression
Rubel says that police departments often make the case for FRT by emphasizing its utility in catching violent criminals. But as with any surveillance technology, there is potential for abuse, especially when it's used for purposes beyond the narrow remit of solving violent crime, he agues.
"The ability to use these surveillance technologies and treat people in bad ways with the vast power of the government increases as our surveillance capabilities increase," he says.
In the current political climate, Rubel is concerned about the potential weaponization of FRT to identify people at political rallies, crack down on constitutionally-protected speech and retaliate against individuals or civil society institutions perceived to be enemies of the state.
"We've seen cases fairly recently where government actors will take political activity to retaliate against institutions, in some cases universities," he says. "We've seen law firms or individuals sometimes say, revoking visas of people who have been engaged in expressive activities."
Racial profiling
As for the mugshots being offered to Biometrica, Rubel says people who get picked up by police and have their mugshot taken don't always end up being convicted. This means non-criminals risk being falsely connected to crimes. And for people of color who have been arrested, that possibility is even greater.
"Facial recognition technologies do worse in identifying people with darker skin tones," he says. "That is, they'll have more false positives, and that makes it more likely that a non white person is going to be identified as someone of interest."
But it's not just folks who've been arrested that need to worry, Rubel says.
Privacy concerns
"You could start with a Facebook photo, or a high school graduation photo, or anything that appears online anywhere," he says. "And if you can attach an identity to that, you can feed it into the the system to identify people on the street."
Overall, Rubel says the public needs greater assurance of constraints to provide accountability and prevent abuse, as well as guarantees about what will happen to all that data if Biometrica is sold off.
"You don't want to just say that a technology is not justifiable because it can be abused. You also don't want to say that just because it can be used for good, we ought to have carte blanche to use it. We want to be careful about honing the tool to do the job and not just allowing it to be a blunt instrument."
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