One afternoon in our lab, my colleague and I were testing our new prototype of software from face recognition on laptops. The software used is video camera to scan our face and guess our age and gender.

The device guessed my age correctly, but when my colleague, who is from Africa, tried it, camera does not detect any faces. We tried turning on the lights in the room, adjusting the chairs and the background, but the system still had trouble detecting his face.

This may interest you: San Francisco is the first city to ban facial recognition

After several failures, software it finally detects her face, but she gets the wrong age and gives the wrong gender.

We software that is only prototypebut the difficulty in working with darker skin tones reflects the experience of people of color trying to use technology face recognition.

In recent years, researchers have demonstrated the unfairness of facial recognition systems and found that: software and algorithms developed by big technology company they are more accurate at recognizing lighter skin tones than darker ones.

However, Guardian recently reported that the UK Home Office plans to have immigrants convicted of criminal offences have their faces scanned five times a day using smart watch equipped with facial recognition technology.

A spokesperson for Ministry of Internal Affairs say that technology facial recognition will not be used on asylum seekers arriving in the UK illegally, and that reports of its use in immigrant criminal It was “purely speculative.”

There are many nuances in this matter, although we must ask ourselves: What rights are limited by a violation privacy, to what extent, and who judges whether violation privacy is balanced with the seriousness of the crime?

In the case of the taken criminal taking pictures from herss face several times a day, we could argue that violation privacy is in the national security interests of most people, if: crime its bad. The government has the right to make such decisions as it is responsible for the safety of its citizens. However, for misdemeanorfacial recognition may be too strong a measure.

In its plan, the Ministry of Home Affairs does not distinguish between light and serious violators; nor does it provide conclusive evidence that face recognition improve public compliance with immigration laws.

Worldwide, facial recognition is more likely to be used to monitor people of color than monitor theirs movement more often than white people. And this despite the fact that the facial recognition system is more accurate with lighter skin tones than darker ones.

Error in face recognition they can also create national security problems for governments. For example, you may mistakenly identify someone’s face as someone else’s. It technology facial recognition is not yet ready for something as important as national security.

️ Subscribe to our Newsletter and receive the most relevant notes in your email

As a society, we must strive to safeguard the dignity and privacy of individuals, except in the most serious cases. More importantly, we must ensure that technology does not potentially discriminate against a single group of people based on ethnic origin. Laws and regulations should apply equally to everyone.

Spokesperson for Ministry of Internal Affairs added: “Society expects us to control criminal cursed stranger… criminal Foreigners should not doubt our determination to deport them, and the government is doing everything it can to increase the number of foreign criminals being deported.”

* Doctoral Researcher, University of Northumbria, Newcastle.

Also read other Normal content ️