A false facial recognition match sent this innocent Black man to jail

There are only a handful of known cases in which facial recognition has been used as the sole evidence in an arrest, and many police departments claim to use facial recognition for investigative leads only. However, according to some privacy advocates, the restrictions on facial recognition being presented as evidence are lax, and there is little transparency about how those matches are being used in criminal cases.

“When we talk about the number of facial recognition scans unfolding in the United States every day, we don’t even know the full number,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit that opposes the use of facial recognition by law enforcement. “You can have people who are being sent to jail wrongly who never know that facial recognition played a role in their arrest.”