Hey everybody, Emily Kwong here. Today we have an episode about the fraught nature of facial

recognition technology. It's from late June, when news broke that Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM

were putting limits on how this technology is used by law enforcement. Facial recognitions

sometimes get it wrong. And this issue was first brought forward by Black computer scientists

and researchers. And we want to highlight them today. Okay, here's the show.

You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

All right, Maddie, let's start with the basics. What do you know about facial recognition technology?

Well, I remember being very weirded out by it when I could suddenly unlock my cell phone with my

face. Right, me too. That's called a one-to-one search. Your phone is basically saying, aha, yes,

this is Maddie's face, we shall unlock. But it also kind of creeps me out. And I will say, Emily,

sometimes it doesn't recognize my face in the morning, which is rude. So here's the thing

about facial recognition. One, it is imperfect and two, it's completely unregulated. There are no

federal laws or standards dictating how these technologies should and shouldn't be used.

Innovations in AI have basically moved way faster than policies to regulate them.

Right. And I guess now we're seeing facial recognition being tested in doctors offices to help

diagnose patients and in shopping malls to look at patterns of how people move around that kind of

stuff. Right. And local and state law enforcement agencies have been using facial recognition technology

for years to identify people through what's called one-to-many searches. Taking let's say a photo

of a suspect or grainy security camera footage and seeking to match the image within these massive

photo databases made up of mug shots, passport and visa pictures and driver's license images.

This technology has helped agencies solve cases, identify victims, but civil liberties groups

say it's a violation of privacy and prone to discrimination. And that's what I want to talk

...