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Is Facial Recognition Tech Biased or Too Good?
IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft are cautious not because of algorithmic bias, but because their technology is unregulated
Over the last couple of months, amidst all the reckoning, three of the biggest companies in tech, IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft, announced that they will stop offering facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies.
IBM led the way with a letter to Congress, in which its CEO, Arvind Krishna, called for “shared responsibility to ensure that Al is tested for bias, particularity when used in law enforcement, and that such bias testing is audited and reported.”
Soon after this announcement, leading news companies like the New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, and Quartz put out articles stating that IBM has ended its facial recognition program and credited this partially to a landmark research conducted in 2018.
The 2018 Gender Shades research
This influential research by Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, titled Gender Shades, brought the issue of bias in facial recognition algorithms to the public spotlight by analyzing the accuracy of gender classification products provided by IBM, Microsoft, and Face++.
