Why Chinese Companies Plug a US Test for Facial Recognition

The company declined to answer queries about its decision to enter the program and interest in government facial recognition contracts, but defended government use of the technology in recent testimony opposing a Washington state bill that would restrict facial recognition.IBM and Amazon both sell facial recognition to local US law enforcement agencies, but neither has submitted its technology to NIST’s testing. Amazon said in January it respects NIST’s test but that its technology is deeply integrated with Amazon’s cloud computing platform and can’t be sent off to Gaithersburg for the agency to test on its own computers.IBM computer vision research manager John Smith said the company was working with NIST to broaden its testing of how well facial recognition works across different demographics before deciding whether to take part.Tech companies and their critics have become more concerned about demographic bias in facial recognition after experiments showed that Amazon’s technology made more errors on black faces, and that facial analysis software from IBM and Microsoft was less accurate for women with darker skin. Amazon disputes the findings, and Microsoft and IBM say they have upgraded their systems.Os Keyes, a researcher at the University of Washington, says findings like those help show that facial recognition must be scrutinized more broadly than through lab tests of accuracy.Keyes published a paper last year criticising NIST and others for contributing to the development of gender recognition software that doesn’t account for trans people, potentially causing problems for an already marginalized group.