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How to regulate face recognition technology

Nature Human Behaviour volume 6, page 476 (2022)Cite this article

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A number of US cities and states have introduced regulations on government use of facial recognition and surveillance technologies. These efforts are vital to prevent these methods from becoming tools of oppression, argues Kade Crockford.

It is already common for police in the USA to use facial recognition for image matching and identification. Here, software compares a still image of an unidentified person — taken from surveillance video, social media or any other source — to a labelled dataset containing images of many other faces. The goal is to put a name to a face. The FBI reportedly has a face recognition dataset that contains hundreds of millions of images of US adults, and state governments use driver’s licence and state identification card images in both criminal and civil investigations. In most states and at the federal level, there are no laws in place to prevent abuse, which is particularly dangerous given that many face recognition algorithms have been found to be less accurate when examining the faces of darker-skinned people, women, children and older individuals. Image matching in the USA has already led to the wrongful arrests of at least three Black men.

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  1. Technology for Liberty Program, American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, Boston, MA, USA

    Kade Crockford

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  1. Kade Crockford
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Correspondence to Kade Crockford.

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I work at the ACLU of Massachusetts, a civil liberties organization.

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Crockford, K. How to regulate face recognition technology. Nat Hum Behav 6, 476 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01329-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01329-3

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