Amazon's facial recognition tool misidentified 28 members of Congress in ACLU test

SAN FRANCISCO -- Amazon's controversial facial recognition program, Rekognition, falsely identified 28 members of Congress during a test of the program by the American Civil Liberties Union, the civil rights group said Thursday. In its test, the ACLU scanned photos of all members of Congress and had the system compare them with a public database of 25,000 mugshots. The group used the default "confidence threshold" setting of 80 percent for Rekognition, meaning the test counted a face match at 80 percent certainty or more. At that setting, the system misidentified 28 members of Congress, a disproportionate number of whom were people of color, tagging them instead as entirely different people who have been arrested for a crime. The faces of members of Congress used in the test include Republicans and Democrats, men and women and legislators of all ages.