A US Agency Rejected Face Recognition--and Landed in Big Trouble

In June 2021, Dave Zvenyach, director of a group tasked with improving digital access to US government services, sent a Slack message to his team. He'd decided that Login.gov, which provides a secure way to access dozens of government apps and websites, wouldn't use selfies and face recognition to verify the identity of people creating new accounts. "The benefits of liveness/selfie do not outweigh any discriminatory impact," he wrote, referring to the process of asking users to upload a selfie and photo of their ID so that algorithms can compare the two. Face recognition technology has become more accurate, but many systems have been found to work less reliably for women with dark skin, people who identify as Asian, or people with a nonbinary gender identity. Yet Zvenyach's pronouncement also put Login.gov and US agencies using the service at odds with federal security guidelines.