Janine Jackson interviewed the Center on Privacy and Technology's Clare Garvie about facial recognition rules for the June 26, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. Janine Jackson: Robert Williams, an African-American man in Detroit, was falsely arrested when an algorithm declared his face a match with security footage of a watch store robbery. Boston City Council voted this week to ban the city's use of facial recognition technology, part of an effort to move resources from law enforcement to community, but also out of concern about dangerous mistakes like that in Williams' case, along with questions about what the technology means for privacy and free speech. As more and more people go out in the streets and protest, what should we know about this powerful tool, and the rules--or lack thereof--governing its use?

Companies are making more use of algorithmic hiring tools to screen a flood of job applicants during the coronavirus pandemic amid questions about whether they introduce new forms of bias into the early vetting process. The tools are designed to more efficiently filter out candidates that don't meet certain job-related criteria, like prior work experience, and to recruit potential hires via their online profiles. Businesses like HireVue offer biometric scanning tools that give applicant feedback based on facial expressions, while others like Pymetrics use behavioral tests to home in on ideal candidates. Companies including Colgate-Palmolive Co., McDonald's Corp., Boston Consulting Group Inc., PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, and Kraft Heinz Co. are using them at a time when 21 million people in the U.S. were without jobs and seeking employment in May, according to the Labor Department. Job candidates might be unable or unwilling to apply and interview in person because of rules limiting social gatherings, said Monica Snyder, a workplace privacy attorney at Fisher Phillips in Boston.

We are seeing more references to machine learning in how Google is ranking pages and other documents in search results. That seems to be a direction that will leave what we know as traditional, or old school signals that are referred to as ranking signals behind. It's still worth considering some of those older ranking signals because they may play a role in how things are ranked. As I was going through a new patent application from Google on ranking image search results, I decided that it was worth including what I used to look at when trying to rank images. Images can rank highly in image search, and they can also help pages that they appear upon rank higher in organic web results, because they can help make a page more relevant for the query terms that page may be optimized for.

Amazon may have banned police from using its facial recognition technology, but a new report shows the tech giant is providing thousands of departments with video and audio footage from Ring. Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends civil liberties, found over 1,400 agencies are working with the Amazon-owned company and hundreds of them have'deadly histories.' Data from sources reveals half of the agencies had at least one fatal encounter in the last five years and altogether are responsible for a third of fatal encounters nationwide. These departments are also involved with the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Alton Sterling, Botham Jean, Antonio Valenzuela, Michael Ramos and Sean Monterrosa. Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends civil liberties, found over 1,400 agencies are working with Amazon-owned Ring and hundreds of them have'deadly histories' DailyMail.com

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology permanently took down its 80 Million Tiny Images dataset--a popular image database used to train machine learning systems to identify people and objects in an environment--because it used a range of racist, misogynistic, and other offensive terms to label photos. In a letter published Monday to MIT's CSAIL website, the three creators of the huge dataset, Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus, and Bill Freeman, apologized and said they had decided to take the dataset offline. "It has been brought to our attention that the Tiny Images dataset contains some derogatory terms as categories and offensive images. This was a consequence of the automated data collection procedure that relied on nouns from WordNet. We are greatly concerned by this and apologize to those who may have been affected," they wrote in the letter.

Esports franchise Team NRG cut ties Thursday with pro player Nairoby Quezada, who plays competitive Super Smash Bros. under the handle Nairo. In a Twitlonger post early Thursday morning, another Smash player, Zack "Captain Zack" Lauth, accused Quezada of sexual misconduct at a 2017 tournament event in Orlando, Florida. Lauth alleges the incident occurred when Quezada was 20 and Lauth was 15, and that Quezada and his brother subsequently paid Lauth money to keep quiet.

MIT has had to take offline a giant dataset that taught AI systems to assign'racist and misogynistic labels' to people in images. The database, known as '80 Million Tiny Images', is a massive collection of photos with descriptive labels, used to teach machine learning models to identify images. But the system, developed at the US university, labelled women as'whores' and'bitches' and used other abhorrent terms against ethnic minorities. It also contained close-up pictures of female genitalia labelled with the C-word and other images with the labels'rape suspect' and'molester'. Images labelled with the slur'whore' ranged from a woman in a bikini to a photo of'a mother holding her baby with Santa', tech website the Register reported.

Award-winning OxFirst, a specialist in the law and economics of IP, has released research that reveals the hidden secrets behind global patent registrations and information on the economic value of patents in the AI sector. While Samsung, IBM and Tencent dominate with the highest number of patents filed, fierce competition between the US and China overshadows other countries, including the EU. Patents are mainly filed in the area of interconnectivity and system architecture, suggesting that top players focus primarily on protecting technologies covering multiple neural nets. Other areas of crucial importance are Machine Learning (ML) and bootstrap methods, alongside procedures used during speech recognition processes; e.g. the further establishment of human-machine dialogue. An analysis of the patent landscape between 2010 and 2020 shows that patents reading on Machine Learning experienced their greatest filing growth in 2017/2018.

For better or worse, there's a good chance your current love life owes something to automation. Even if you're just hooking up with the occasional Tinder fling (which if you are, no judgment), you're still turning to Tinder's black-box algorithms to pick out that fling for you before turning to more black-box algorithms to pick out the best dingy bar to meet them at before turning to more black-box algorithms to figure out what, exactly, should be your date night lewk. If things get serious further down the line, you might turn to another black-box algorithm to plan your entire damn wedding for you. And if it turns out you got married for all the wrong reasons, it turns out there's another set of black boxes you can plug your details into to settle the details of your divorce. Known as "amica," the service was rolled out yesterday by the Australian government as a way to let soon-to-be-exes "make parenting arrangements" and "divide their money and property" without having to go through the hassle of hiring a lawyer to do the heavy lifting.

As The Register's Katyanna Quach wrote: "Thanks to MIT's cavalier approach when assembling its training set, though, these systems may also label women as whores or bitches, and Black and Asian people with derogatory language. The database also contained close-up pictures of female genitalia labeled with the C-word."