The little-known AI firms whose facial recognition tech led to a false arrest

Robert Williams went to jail because a computer--and a pair of Detroit police officers--made a mistake. The officers relied on facial recognition software to identify Williams as a suspect in a 15-month-old shoplifting case. They were wrong--making Williams perhaps the first known case of a wrongful arrest resulting from faulty facial recognition. Earlier this month, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon swore off or paused their sale of facial recognition tools to US police and called on Congress to regulate the technology. It was sold by police contractor DataWorks Plus, and powered by algorithms from Japanese tech firm NEC and Colorado-based Rank One Computing.