A minor technical nitpick: the article, and the activists it quotes, make the claim that facial recognition discriminates against minorities because it is inaccurate. The state of the art in facial recognition technology has been superhumanly accurate (e.g. telling apart identical twins better than humans can, finding pictures with significant weight or age differences) on all subgroups for several years now, and the racial disparities in accuracy are minuscule relative to the level of noise. It will keep improving: e.g. it is quite plausible we will be able to infer parts of a person’s genotype from ordinary pictures of their face.
I call this a nitpick because “face rec discriminates because it is inaccurate” vs “face rec discriminates because it very accurately reproduces society’s bias” doesn’t make much difference to the activists’ argument; after all, it matters little whether the discrimination arises by bumbling incompetence or by efficient indifference. But I thought I would mention it so that the more technically-minded are not accidentally misled about the technological progress in the area.
I call this a nitpick because “face rec discriminates because it is inaccurate” vs “face rec discriminates because it very accurately reproduces society’s bias” doesn’t make much difference to the activists’ argument; after all, it matters little whether the discrimination arises by bumbling incompetence or by efficient indifference. But I thought I would mention it so that the more technically-minded are not accidentally misled about the technological progress in the area.