New York police used celebrity doppelgängers to blur facial recognition results, say researchers



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By Jon Schuppe

The New York Police Department abused its facial recognition system by editing the photos of suspects and downloading celebrity look-alikes to identify people wanted for crimes.

The findings, drawn from documents obtained during a two-year legal battle with the NYPD, were included in a survey of the Georgetown Center for Privacy and Technology on the use of recognition. facial by the police across the country. The report was released Thursday, as some cities, including San Francisco, called for a total ban on the use of the technology by the police, which is explained by the growing resistance to a technology secret that, according to critics, could increase the risk of erroneous arrests.

"It does not matter how accurate facial recognition algorithms are if the police introduce very subjective, highly modified, or simply false information into their systems," said report author Clare Garvie, senior contributor to the Center on Privacy and Privacy. Technology. in facial recognition. "They are not going to get good information, they are not going to have any good leads, there is a high risk of misidentification, and it breaks the due process when they use it and they do not share them with defense lawyers. "

Facial recognition algorithms compare images of unidentified people with photo IDs, reservation photos and driver's license photos. Police are adopting this technology for routine investigations, claiming that it helps them solve crimes that would otherwise be threatened. They say that they use it as an investigative tool and that this is not a reason to arrest someone else.

A document obtained by the ACLU describes a "case study" on the use of a sketch for facial recognition in Washington County, Oregon. Public records obtained by ACLU Oregon & amp; Northern California

The Georgetown report did not focus exclusively on the New York police. He also documented policies that appeared to allow officers to submit artist sketches to facial recognition systems in Maricopa County, Arizona; Washington County, Oregon; and Pinellas County, Florida.

The Washington County Sheriff's Office "has in fact never used sketching with our facial recognition program for a concrete case," said a spokesman in a statement. "A sketch was only used for demonstration purposes, in a test environment."

A spokesman for the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office responded in the same way: "We do not use sketches with our facial recognition system," the spokesman said in a statement.

Maricopa County did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The NYPD occupies a prominent place in the report.

The department objected to Georgetown's efforts to obtain information on the operation of its facial recognition system, engaging in a long skirmish in court about documents it may disclose. . The ministry finally handed out thousands of pages of documents, but has since tried to bring back some of them, claiming that they were confidential and inadvertently shared. These disputed documents were not used as a source for the report released Thursday, Garvie said.

A spokesman for the NYPD said Thursday in a statement that he was "deliberate and responsible in his use of facial recognition technology" and that he used it to solve various crimes, ranging from homicides and rapes to attacks on the city's metro ", as well as in investigations into missing or unidentified persons.The spokesperson did not dispute anything in the Georgetown report, but said that the Ministry was reviewing its "facial recognition protocols".

An internal NYPD document, left, describes the use of celebrity comparisons for its facial recognition system, a technique that included the use of a photo of Woody Harrelson (and not from the picture shown here).NYPD / AP file

Georgetown researchers said they discovered a case in which investigators from the New York Police Department were trying to identify a man being stolen of beer in a surveillance surveillance system. Quoting a detective's internal report on the case, the researchers said that the surveillance image was not of very high quality and that it did not produce potential matches in the facial recognition system. But a detective noted that the suspect looked like the actor Woody Harrelson. A high resolution image of Harrelson has been transmitted instead of the suspect. According to the researchers, the detectives found in the new list of results a candidate who, in their opinion, was a match, leading to an arrest.

The researchers also found evidence that New York police investigators had tampered with images of suspects to make them look more like mugshots, including replacing an open mouth with a closed mouth by taking pictures of a man. Google model and sticking that person's lips on the suspect's image. The department also used 3D modeling software to fill in incomplete images or rotate faces to steer them forward, the researchers said.

An internal NYPD document describes the modification of facial expressions on a submitted photo for facial recognition. NYPD

"These techniques come down to making facial identity points: at best, trying to create information that does not exist at the origin and, at worst, presenting evidence that matches a person other than than the one sought, "says the report.

The report then detailed other questionable methods at the NYPD, including the fact of not having used traditional survey techniques to confirm a facial recognition result.

In a second report, also released Thursday, Georgetown researchers described plans in Detroit and Chicago to create real-time face recognition systems by connecting the software to surveillance cameras positioned across cities. Critics consider that such systems are the next step in the government's ability to extend public oversight.

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