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Jeff Bezos must really be getting tired of these headlines coming up all the time. It seems that their facial recognition software (known as Rekognition) has been subjected to yet another test and come up a little short. Or a lot short, particularly if you happen to be one of the more than two dozen state lawmakers who showed up as hits matching them against a database of known criminals. But hey… when you’re making omelets you’ve got to crack a few eggs, right? (CBS San Francisco) A recent test of Amazon’s facial recognition technology reportedly ended with a major...

About 1 in 5 legislators was erroneously matched to a person who had been arrested when the ACLU used the software to screen their pictures against a database of 25,000 publicly available booking photos. Last year, in a similar experiment done with photos of members of Congress, the software erroneously matched 28 federal legislators with mug shots.

In this face recognition article, I will guide you to create your own face recognition in images. For this purpose, I will use Python face recognition library and Pillow which is Python Imaging Library(PIL). I chose to use Visual Studio Code since I need to use integrated terminal. First, I start with setting a virtual environment and install pipenv on my terminal...

San Francisco has become the first U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition technology by police and city agencies. The city's Board of Supervisors voted 8-1 on a measure Tuesday, an action several other cities and states could follow. The ordinance also requires city departments to disclose any surveillance technologies they currently use or plan to use, and to spell out policies regarding them that the Board of Supervisors must then approve. The ban does not affect personal, business or federal government use of facial recognition technology. The ordinance will not become law until the Board of Supervisors...

NYPD officers arrested Ousmane Bah on November 29th after he was falsely linked to a series of Apple Store thefts in Boston, New Jersey, Delaware and Manhattan. Apparently, the real perpetrator used a stolen ID that had his name, address and other personal information. However, since the ID didn't have a photo, the lawsuit states Apple programmed its stores' face recognition system to associate the real thief's face with Bah's details. A detective that eventually examined Apple's surveillance footage after the arrest determined that the real Bah didn't look anything like the thief. Further, Bah was attending his senior prom...

A government watchdog says the FBI is ignoring its concerns about the accuracy of facial recognition technology, as well as issues regarding citizens’ Fourth Amendment privacy rights. NextGov reports that the bureau still hasn’t assessed whether its facial recognition technology has met accuracy and privacy standards fully three years after the Government Accountability Office raised a number of concerns regarding its use. The site noted: Since 2015, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have used the Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System, which uses facial recognition software to link potential suspects to crimes, pulling from a database of more than...

When Kurt Luther walked into Pittsburgh’s Heinz History Center in 2013 to attend an exhibition about Pennsylvania during the Civil War, he didn’t expect to be greeted by his great-great-great-uncle. A computer scientist and Civil War enthusiast, Luther had been drawn to researching his own family’s connection to the conflict, gradually piecing together information over years and years. But his searches had always failed to turn up a photograph, and Luther was ready to give up on the possibility of ever seeing his ancestors’ faces. It was only through sheer happenstance that, walking through the History Center that day, Luther...

28 members of Congress were wrongly matched to criminal mugshots from a database public mugshot photographs. In a study by the American Civil Liberties Union, all 535 faces of lawmakers in the House and Senate were scanned against the faces of the 25,000 mugshots, using Amazon’s Rekognition application programming interface. Included in the list of 28 lawmakers who were falsely identified as criminals were Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., Sens. John Isakson, R-Ga., and Ed Markey, D-Mass. ACLU also noted that a high percentage of those caught up in the false matches were people of color. An Amazon spokesperson told the...

--snip-- over the last five years a secretive surveillance company founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer has been quietly building a massive facial recognition database consisting of faces acquired from the giant social network, YouTube and countless other websites. Privacy activists are suitably alarmed. --snip--

Facial recognition technology is improving by leaps and bounds. Some commercial software can now tell the gender of a person in a photograph. When the person in the photo is a white man, the software is right 99 percent of the time. But the darker the skin, the more errors arise — up to nearly 35 percent for images of darker skinned women, according to a new study that breaks fresh ground by measuring how the technology works on people of different races and gender. These disparate results, calculated by Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the M.I.T. Media Lab, show...

BEIJING - As hundreds of millions of Chinese begin traveling for the Lunar New Year holiday, police are showing off a new addition to their crowd-surveillance toolbox: mobile facial-recognition units mounted on eyeglasses ... The eyeglass-mounted camera is equipped with facial-recognition technology capable of “highly effective screening” of crowds for fugitives traveling under false pretenses ... The devices have already helped railway police at Zhengzhou’s East Railway Station capture seven people wanted in connection with major criminal cases, and 26 others who were traveling using other people’s identities ...

Facebook has implemented facial recognition on its platform, and all you have to do is sign over your face. For the low, low cost of free — insofar as “free” constitutes permission to access, store, and use your face — Facebook will add another layer of convenience to the largest data harvesting experiment in history. With the new facial recognition features, the lumbering social media network will alert you to uploaded photos in which you are featured — so long as you are in a group permitted to see them by the uploader. It will also work to prevent catfishing...

From toilet-paper dispensers to fast-food restaurants, travel and crimefighting, China is taking the lead in rolling out facial-recognition technology. But while advocates warn it makes life easier, quicker and safer, opponents counter that it is another example of how the Chinese government keeps a sinister and increasingly close eye on its 1.4 billion people. Shanghai and other Chinese cities have recently started deploying facial recognition to catch those who flout the rules of the road. Jaywalkers at some Shanghai intersections have their images flashed up on a nearby screen for public shaming and must pay a fine of 20 yuan...

Consumers are already questioning whether FaceID could be spoofed. And it's also possible police would be able to more easily unlock phones without consent by simply holding an individual’s phone up to his or her face. But FaceID should create fear about another form of government surveillance: mass scans to identify individuals based on face profiles. Law enforcement is rapidly increasing use of facial recognition; one in two American adults are already enrolled in a law enforcement facial recognition network, and at least one in four police departments have the capacity to run face recognition searches. Still, until now, co-opting...

Back in January, Food and Wine reported that KFC China would be introducing a facial recognition system that would predict your order (it’s not as creepy as it sounds). Now it looks like the brand is enhancing that technology with additional features. According to Reuters, the system lets customers pay by face, just by approaching one of the store's newly unveiled monitors. The new device is located at a KFC outpost in the city of Hangzhou. The facial recognition system is called Smile to Pay, and it’s being featured at a Yum Brands (the company behind KFC) so-called concept store...

An approach to machine learning inspired by the human brain is about to revolutionize street search. Even if the cop who pulls you over doesn’t recognize you, the body camera on his chest just might in the future. Device-maker Motorola announced Monday that would partner with artificial intelligence software startup Neurala to build “real-time learning for a person of interest search” on Motorola products such as the Si500 body camera for police, the AI firm announced in a press release today.

The facial recognition database used by the FBI is “out of control,” according to a new report by The Guardian. “Approximately half of adult Americans’ photographs are stored in facial recognition databases that can be accessed by the FBI, without their knowledge or consent, in the hunt for suspected criminals,” reported The Guardian on Monday. “About 80% of photos in the FBI’s network are non-criminal entries, including pictures from driver’s licenses and passports. The algorithms used to identify matches are inaccurate about 15% of the time, and are more likely to misidentify black people than white people.” “These are just...

New anti-surveillance clothing has been developed, allowing wearers to prevent security cameras which use facial recognition technology from recognizing them. The clothing uses complex colored patterns of digitalized faces, and parts of faces, to overload and trick facial recognition software. New anti-surveillance clothing has been developed, allowing wearers to prevent security cameras which use facial recognition technology from recognizing them. The clothing uses complex colored patterns of digitalized faces, and parts of faces, to overload and trick facial recognition software. The patterned design of the clothing overwhelm and confuse facial recognition systems by presenting them with too many faces to...

DMV records, plus a cavalier approach to mugshot databases, puts half of the US in the system Half of all American adults are already in some sort of facial recognition network accessible to law enforcement, according to a comprehensive new study. Conducted over a year and relying in part on Freedom of Information and public record requests to 106 law enforcement agencies, the study, conducted by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, found American police use of facial recognition technology is a scattered, hodgepodge network of laws and regulations.

* All in a good cause: FamilyNotes is for learning the Face API * Microsoft has GitHubbed a framework that could finally make an Internet-connected refrigerator useful: an application for family members to leave notes for each other. Well, actually FamilyNotes is a developer demonstrator with two aims: to give developers more examples of putting code together in the Universal Windows Platform, and to help Microsoft understand how UWP is going. The app, here, lets a user leave a note tagged for another user, and if the device (for example a tablet) identifies the recipient of the note (using facial...