Amazon's Facial Recgonition Software Has a Dangerous Race Problem

In a report published Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union found that Amazon's facial recognition software mistakenly matched 28 U.S. Congresspeople to photos from a mugshot database. The software--which is already in use by some police departments--was disproportionately inaccurate in identifying people of color. In the test, the ACLU used Amazon's Rekognition software to compare photos of the 535 members of the House and Senate to a database of 25,000 mugshots, for an overall inaccuracy rate of 5%. But while only 20% of the members of Congress are non-white, about 40% of the falsely ID'd legislators were men and women of color. The potential outcomes of such misidentifications in life-or-death police encounters are terrifying to consider.