MEP: Public has a 'right to know' about Commission's lie detector tech

The European Commission is being urged to publish reports on the trials of an Artificial Intelligence lie detector technology, iBorderCTRL, which has been bankrolled by the EU's long-term research and development funding mechanism, Horizon 2020. Green MEP Patrick Breyer, who is currently embroiled in a legal battle with the Commission's Research Agency for its refusal to disclose ethical assessments of the iBorderCTRL system, said on Tuesday (31 March) that the executive is also refusing to publish information on trials that have been conducted for the technology. The iBorderCTRL system has been tested on various frontiers throughout the EU and uses advanced artificial intelligence technologies to analyse micro-expressions. One of its uses is to detect whether a user is lying or not, when presented with a series of questions, in what has been termed'deception detection.' As part of the trials of the technology, MEP Breyer had sought out information on this component of iBorderCTRL and the proportion of'false positives' that had been identified by the system, following an investigation by The Intercept, which found that the technology made several errors, incorrectly identifying four out of sixteen honest answers as false. Breyer had also pressed the Commission on whether the technology discriminates against certain groups of people, including people of colour, women, the elderly, children, and people with disabilities.