Despite research showing FBI facial recognition misidentified black faces more than white ones, the project leads proudly told…

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Despite research showing FBI facial recognition misidentified black faces more than white ones, the project leads proudly told us they had no intention of independently testing for racial bias. They had not asked the vendor if they had tested the algorithm for bias. It wasn’t a concern.

Similarly, they were wilfully ignorant of the demographic data in their Carnival dataset. They didn’t know the ethnicities, ages or gender of those on their watch list – nor did they want to.

The ‘race-blind’ ‘data-blind’ fallacy has a clear temptation for the Met. If the same attitude were taken to data collection around stop and search, the fact that black people are six times more likely to be stopped than white people could be dismissed as an unsubstantiated myth, rather than the race equality crisis it is.

–Misidentification and improvised rules - we lift the lid on the Met’s Notting Hill facial recognition operation (viaiamdanw)