The New York Times article covered the flawed facial recognition technology created by Amazon. With a database of 25,00 publicly available mugshots, the “technology incorrectly matched lawmakers with people who had been charged with a crime.” Although the software initially served to prevent human trafficking, facial recognition is fast becoming a top target for civil liberties groups and privacy experts. This way, civil liberties groups view it as a surveillance system to lower political protests by eliminating anonymity. In the wrong hands, facial recognition can be inseparable from a tool of social control.

Northpointe’s algorithm has been shown to turn up flawed results. Broward County, Florida uses the score in pretrial hearings, and ProPublica’s research proved it remarkably unreliable. Only 20 percent of those predicted to commit violent crimes did so, and when looking at all crimes it was only slightly more reliable “than a coin flip.” Moreover, it turned up black defendants as more likely to be future criminals two times as much as whites, and also incorrectly labeled whites as low risk more frequently.

Regarding ethics, we determined multiple options for possible outcomes. One extreme would be for technologies such as the risk assessment algorithm and Amazon’s facial recognition to continue to be used in their current capacities. This would mean bias being perpetuated in yet another mode. The opposing option for the former would be for these technologies to be banned entirely. While this would prevent the fundamental flaws currently happening with both the algorithm and facial recognition, there are also benefits that can be had from using this technology, were bias, specifically against people of color, to be removed. As we spoke about in class, just because a product has a high success rate, that does not mean that the success rate of predicting is equal among everybody. Thus, while an average looks successful, the accuracy can be completely skewed. Therefore, the third alternative, which is the alternative our group said we could live with, is to ban products like these until they can be re-thought and created to display no bias.