IBM will no longer offer general purpose facial recognition or analysis software, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in a letter to Congress today. The company will also no longer develop or research the technology, IBM tells The Verge. Krishna addressed the letter to Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Reps. Karen Bass (D-CA), Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), and Jerrold Nadler (D-NY).
“IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any [facial recognition] technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency,” Krishna said in the letter. “We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies.”
Facial recognition software has improved greatly over the last decade thanks to advances in artificial intelligence. At the same time, the technology — because it is often provided by private companies with little regulation or federal oversight — has been shown to suffer from bias along lines of age, race, and ethnicity, which can make the tools unreliable for law enforcement and security and ripe for potential civil rights abuses.
In 2018, research by Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru revealed for the first time the extent to which many commercial facial recognition systems (including IBM’s) were biased. This work and the pair’s subsequent studies led to mainstream criticism of these algorithms and ongoing attempts to rectify bias.
A December 2019 National Institute of Standards and Technology study found “empirical evidence for the existence of a wide range of accuracy across demographic differences in the majority of the current face recognition algorithms that were evaluated,” for example. The technology has also come under fire for its role in privacy violations.
Notably, NIST’s study did not include technology from Amazon, which is one of the few major tech companies to sell facial recognition software to law enforcement. Yet Rekognition, the name of the program, has also been criticized for its accuracy. In 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union found that Rekognition incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress to faces picked from 25,000 public mugshots, for example.
Another company, Clearview AI, has come under heavy scrutiny starting earlier this year when it was discovered that its facial recognition tool, built with more than 3 billion images compiled in part from scraping social media sites, was being widely used by private sector companies and law enforcement agencies. Clearview has since been issued numerous cease and desist orders and is at the center of a number of privacy lawsuits. Facebook was also ordered in January to pay $550 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its unlawful use of facial recognition technology.
IBM has tried to help with the issue of bias in facial recognition, releasing a public data set in 2018 designed to help reduce bias as part of the training data for a facial recognition model. But IBM was also found to be sharing a separate training data set of nearly one million photos in January 2019 taken from Flickr without the consent of the subjects — though the photos were shared under a Creative Commons license. IBM told The Verge in a statement at the time that the data set would only be accessed by verified researchers and only included images that were publicly available. The company also said that individuals can opt-out of the data set.
In his letter, Krishna also advocated for police reform, arguing that more police misconduct cases should be put under the purview of federal court and that Congress should make changes to qualified immunity doctrine, among other measures. In addition, Krishna said that “we need to create more open and equitable pathways for all Americans to acquire marketable skills and training,” and he suggested Congress consider scaling the P-TECH school model nationally and expanding eligibility for Pell Grants.
Update, June 9th, 2:45AM ET: This story has been updated to reference the work of AI researchers Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, whose 2018 Gender Shades project provided the first comprehensive empirical data on bias in facial recognition systems.
Comments
Let’s face it (pun intended), the only reason why IBM axed this is because they weren’t making loads of money for them, their new executive is getting rid a lot of unprofitable branches like Watson.
By zyofeng on 06.08.20 10:09pm
Yes, it’s almost certainly about money and not politics (ahem WW2 IBM). AI & machine learning is progressing exponentially & facial recognition is a low-hanging fruit that’s already a commodity. It’s the vast face database that’s most valuable, and IBM doesn’t own that.
By farrellj on 06.09.20 12:22am
Microsoft acquired the database by purchasing LinkedIn. Now they are the leaders in Face Recognition.
By Radek Svoboda CZ on 06.09.20 3:29am
I literally don’t understand this "We won’t do it because it might be misused" song.
It does a bad job on recognizing people of color – extend your dataset! Get more photos! Train it better!
"Might be misused" – it’s a tool. It WILL be misused. Wouldn’t it be better if you, as a big company, develop this tool and know of its caveats and pitfalls instead? Or would you rather let some random company out of nowhere with questionable expertise do it?
By Vishnyakov Pavel on 06.09.20 1:31am
I’d say the view is let it not be our problem to solve. There is nothing wrong with that view.
By Lomifeh on 06.09.20 9:33am
Nice that they are giving up but it doesn’t really mean much.
Looking longterm there’ll be some more unscrupulous companies that will definitely develop some horrifically dystopian facial recognition and tracking system and it will be widespread, the tech is already there and in place.
Honestly don’t see this genie going back in the bottle.
By Ponk on 06.09.20 5:39am
Chinese facial tech is so good that they have a high success rate even on people wearing masks, they are even now training AI to recognise gaits where faces are fully obscured.
Facebook was highly accurate a decade ago and has since had countless photos added to it’s database to further develop.
US government research has been going for probably longer than any of us know and who knows what it is capable of.
Sounds like a good time for IBM to get out of the game. Nobody is going to misuse IBM software whatever they do, it is an inferior product. Gotta spin that right though so investors don’t question why millions or billions were wasted on this.
By CHeif_Eagle on 06.09.20 6:32am
Do you believe that the Chinese face recognition tech is that good? They have very strong incentive to say that it’s that good, certainly. Fear is a powerful motivator for obedience.
It could also be that they don’t happen to worry that much about false positives. They tend to be less important when you don’t live in a democratic society.
By Turbofrog on 06.09.20 9:24am
Seeing as they also use facial recognition for payment verification at many businesses in China, I’d assume that they’d want the false positive rate to be as low as possible for those applications; it’s just good business sense. Extending these systems to mass surveillance is a whole other thing, of course.
By trost79muh on 06.09.20 9:31pm
Facial recognition is used for payment verification, yes. It’s also used to punish someone who "crossed the line", by closing that person’s bank account, blocking bankcards etc.
I believe mass surveillance is already present in China.
Here in Europe, I’m from The Netherlands, we’re made to believe that Russia or the US is "the enemy" and the powers to be feared. We ignored China’s attempts to create a world power, when China bought most harbours all over the world, began to sell large amounts of products to the US, creating a customer-attitude where too much money was spent, due to the cheap price of Chinese products. Debts of a large number of American citizens are huge.
Wuhan is the part of China where 2 weeks before the pandemic struck, 5G was activated in full force. It’s hardly mentioned in the mainstream news. I’m not suggesting that 5G radiation caused the pandemic. The effect of the radiation may have weakened the nervous system of many people in Wuhan, also weakening the immune system. When the virus was "distributed" it was known that it would be a hard blow with shocking results.
Mass surveillance is in full force since the pandemic was announced. Look at the enormous fees people need to pay when they "cross the line" and disobey in the eyes of the surveilling police. Each person’s freedom to move is restricted and the 1,5 or 2 meters distance allows for satellites, to identify members of protest marches and rioteers.
By Marian B. on 06.28.20 6:29pm
In my eyes, face recognition is a violation of that person’s privacy and it’s abused in China, where a social credit system controls all communication by smartphones. All buyers of smartphones MUST pass a picture of their face so that their texts, tweets and comments are monitored by means of face recognition. In earlier conditions, Chinese citizens used the excuse "Oh, that text, that wasn’t me. Someone else used my phone" when they were criticised for using certain phrases and words. In other words, surveillance is part of the Chinese world 100% 24:7.
Apart from the opinions in other comments here, expressing doubts about the so called well intended decision, I believe we need to take into account that tattoo-markers are present in the COVID-19 vaccines. Each person can be tracked and checked, to control if the vaccine is taken. It’s explained in this article:
https://newswithviews.com/quantum-tattoo-and-a-digital-scannable-vaccine/
The plan with this vaccination, is to control the population worldwide, create rules about who’s going to school, to the theater, to the sportsclub or swimming pool, with the decision to refuse those who didn’t receive the vaccination. Scanning instruments will be used.
A next step, for some of you it’s a logical next step, is the ID-chip placed under the skin, trackable and scannable as well. Can you see why face recognition is out of fashion soon? At least, there’s a plan that may lead to this ID-chip implant, it’s not absolute that this plan will be rolled out.
Instead of the need for cameras and DNA tests, checking a person’s identity, a device will be placed inside the body, preferably under the skin, inside the lower arm. These chips already exist and are in use, for those who choose to accept implants that add to the comfort of entering the home, the work-office, or any form of opening (and closing of) doors, by waving one’s arm in the air. Remember, we’ve got remote controls for our telly and car as if it’s always been part of life.
I don’t believe that IBM has the intention to be good and help us to prevent all sorts of issues. Before facial recognition was invented, those issues were known, but certainly not stopping the designers. Where’s moral consideration when it’s about the Wishing Well of Wonders? Digital technology is by definition void of any moral value as in the choice to rule it or be ruled by it, is each and every person’s own choice. Digital technology has no soul, it exists of zeros and ones.
There’s possibly another agenda under the outer layer of digital technology, visible to the public.
Did any of you watch the presentation by Soshana Zubov, about surveillance in many forms, programming customers for the benefit of corporations? An iron fist wrapped by a velvet glove. Yikes.
By Marian B. on 06.28.20 6:12pm