Facial Recognition: Racist and Discriminatory?
- Article 10.
- Jul 16, 2020
- 2 min read
A recent report from the UN Special Rapporteur on racism has highlighted entrenched racism and discrimination present in technology.
In a recent report delivered to the UN Human Rights Council Tendayi Achiume, UN Special Rapporteur on racism stated that technology is ‘fundamentally shaped by the racial, ethnic, gender and other inequalities prevalent in life’.
This racism and discrimination present in technology is leading to inequality in all areas of life from criminal justice to education. Tools such as facial recognition have been created to target suspects on the basis of their skin colour and social media platforms like Facebook make a profit from such discrimination and intolerance. Achiume stated there must be greater scrutiny of how the design and use of digital technologies are further entrenching systemic racism’ as part of the human rights response to the deaths of George Floyd and many others.
How is racism entrenched in technology?
Racism has become entrenched in technology mainly through the unconscious bias of those training and coding technology such as AI. The data that is input into these technologies are often based on the bias that is present in today’s society and so creates a discriminatory piece of technology. For example, a study carried out by The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found that criminal suspect facial recognition devices were more likely to find a false positive match for Asian and African-American faces over Caucasian faces. This meant the technology was more likely to identify an Asian or African-American face as a criminal suspect than a Caucasian face.
With the rise of technology and facial recognition, this is a worrying statistic. NIST responded to these results by urging facial recognition developers to conduct more research into mitigating these biases in technology. It seems that more regulation is needed in order to combat the racial entrenchment of technology as currently, such technology is not fit for purpose.
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