“…Porcha Woodruff is suing the city of Detroit alleging false arrest based on inaccurate facial recognition data.
The local police managed to get an arrest warrant based on that data and came to Woodruff’s home to execute it, in front of her children. Woodruff was also eight months pregnant at the time, but that didn’t dissuade the officers that she was in fact a suspect in a robbery and carjacking case.”
Analyst Comment: This is a problem we’ve highlighted before; many of these “high-tech” surveillance solutions don’t work well in the real-world. Facial recognition technology performance varies greatly depending on the quality, angle and clarity of the images being compared. In real-world situations, facial images from security cameras are low-resolution, with poor lighting and are taken at angles, providing high error rates. In cities with millions of people, this means many innocent people will be targeted based on incorrect facial-recognition matches.