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QUESTION

What are the accuracy issues with facial recognition technology and how do they impact different demographics?

2:30:58

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95 sec

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The experts explain that facial recognition algorithms are often inaccurate, especially for recognizing women of color where the accuracy can be less than a third.

Facial recognition systems were primarily trained on data of white men under ideal conditions.
There are significant discrepancies between the training data and real-world deployment conditions.
Facial recognition technology does not actually 'recognize' faces like humans, but rather matches facial images to a database through algorithms and math.
These matches can never be 100% accurate, leading to potential misidentifications.

Shahana K. Hanif

2:30:58

Thank you, chair, and thank you for your testimonies.

2:31:02

So humans recognize people by faces.

2:31:05

That's one of the main jobs of a door attendant.

2:31:07

Why shouldn't a computer do the same thing?

Nina Loshkajian

2:31:12

Because it's not as good as it, and it's been trained only to recognize certain types of faces.

2:31:19

You know, the algorithms that facial technicians systems use and rely on.

2:31:24

They what I think it was a councilmember of Palo Alto, you know, again, who said that they are 99% accurate.

2:31:30

That is true only for white men under ideal laboratory conditions.

2:31:34

For women of color, they can be like less than a third accurate.

2:31:39

So the discrepancies between, you know, the pool of people that these tools were trained on and real world conditions that they're being deployed in now are just night and day.

Kelly Moan

2:31:52

And I don't know if

Nina Loshkajian

2:31:53

the other panelists wanna add.

UNKNOWN

2:31:54

If I could also add facial recognition is something of a misnomer.

2:32:00

Recognition is like a human thing.

2:32:02

As you got out in your question, What these algorithms do is not actually recognition in any real sense.

2:32:09

It's mathematics and an algorithm.

2:32:13

It's a map.

2:32:14

It's a matching system, and that match can never be a 100% accurate.

2:32:19

A computer can never recognize a person.

2:32:22

It can only say that it maybe matches a face that's within the database, and we know that those matches are often inaccurate.

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