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.

Their lifeless eyes peer from building facades, lampposts and streetlight poles. They never sleep, never even blink. And now, enabled by advances in computing power and artificial intelligence, surveillance cameras can do more than just watch. They can recognize, and they can remember. The district attorney for Pennsylvania's second-most-populous county has assembled a network of advanced surveillance cameras in and around Pittsburgh and has enlisted colleagues in four surrounding counties to extend its reach into their jurisdictions.

On Tuesday, in an 8-1 tally, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to ban the use of facial recognition software by city departments, including police. Supporters of the ban cited racial inequality in audits of facial recognition software from companies like Amazon and Microsoft, as well as dystopian surveillance happening now in China. At the core of arguments around the regulation of facial recognition software use is the question of whether a temporary moratorium should be put in place until police and governments adopt policies and standards or it should be permanently banned. Some believe facial recognition software can be used to exonerate the innocent and that more time is needed to gather information. Others, like San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin, believe that even if AI systems achieve racial parity, facial recognition is a "uniquely dangerous and oppressive technology."

Police departments across the nation are generating leads and making arrests by feeding celebrity photos, CGI renderings, and manipulated images into facial recognition software. Often unbeknownst to the public, law enforcement is identifying suspects based on "all manner of'probe photos,' photos of unknown individuals submitted for search against a police or driver license database," a study published on Thursday by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology reported. The new research comes on the heels of a landmark privacy vote on Tuesday in San Francisco, which is now the first US city to ban the use of facial recognition technology by police and government agencies. A recent groundswell of opposition has led to the passage of legislation that aims to protect marginalized communities from spy technology. These systems "threaten to fundamentally change the nature of our public spaces," said Clare Garvie, author of the study and senior associate at the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology.

In Washington County, Oregon, sheriff's deputies use a mobile app to send photos of suspects to Amazon's cloud computing service. The e-commerce giant's algorithms check those faces against a database of tens of thousands of mugshots, using Amazon's Rekognition image analysis service. Such use of facial recognition by law enforcement is essentially unregulated. But some developers of the technology want to change that. In a blog post Thursday, Amazon asked Congress to put some rules around the use of the technology, echoing a call by Microsoft in December.

Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI), society is now facing a unique challenge: how do we regulate the usage of human faces and voices? Facial recognition is the ability of computer systems to identify and us by our faces. Voice recognition is the ability of computer systems to do the same for our words. Both are powered by AI, and both create benefits for consumers and citizens. These technologies also raise difficult questions about privacy and personal rights.

One year ago, Craig Federighi opened his eyes, stared into the brand-new iPhone X, and showed the world how he could unlock it with his face. Or, at least, he tried. It took the Apple executive a few attempts and one back-up phone to get the screen to unlock without a fingerprint or a passcode. But then, like magic, he was in. This was Apple's annual fall hardware show, where the company dangles its newest iPhones before the world and sets the tone for consumer products to come.

NEC Corporation of America already supplies many American jurisdictions with still photo facial recognition. Now the company says its getting law enforcement inquiries about its real-time facial recognition. NEC Corporation of America already supplies many American jurisdictions with still photo facial recognition. Now the company says its getting law enforcement inquiries about its real-time facial recognition. You've seen it in the movies for years: Security cameras find a face in a crowd, and -- Enhance! -- a computer comes up with a name.

"You good?" a man asked two narcotics detectives late in the summer of 2015. The detectives had just finished an undercover drug deal in Brentwood, a predominately black neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida, that is among the poorest in the country, when the man unexpectedly approached them. One of the detectives responded that he was looking for $50 worth of "hard"– slang for crack cocaine. The man disappeared into a nearby apartment and came back out to fulfill the detective's request, swapping the drugs for money. "You see me around, my name is Midnight," the dealer said as he left.

Apple will let you unlock the iPhone X with your face - a move likely to bring facial recognition to the masses. But along with the roll out of the technology, are concerns over how it could be used. Despite Apple's safeguards, privacy activists fear the widespread use of facial recognition would'normalise' the technology. This could open the door to broader use by law enforcement, marketers or others of a largely unregulated tool, creating a'surveillance technology that is abused'. Facial recognition could open the door to broader use by law enforcement, marketers or others of a largely unregulated tool, creating a'surveillance technology that is abused', experts have warned.