Expanding Solutions to Address the Risks of Face Recognition Systems

Today we are publishing the first of a series of discussion papers regarding face recognition and biometrics. The ideas in this paper will be discussed in the ID4Africa live cast, Spotlight on Face Recognition.

Too often, discussions about what to do about the risks of face recognition have lacked the kinds of specific protections for the use of face recognition that exist in abundance in other contexts, such as drug safety or chemical safety. These robust, effective and time-tested regulatory solutions have been omitted from the discussion of how to address face recognition risks. This has left a gap.

To make progress, it will be necessary to mature and expand the regulatory dialogue around face recognition systems and biometrics. Adapting practices from existing, useful safety models is an important step to bringing in workable, tested ideas for addressing products that pose risks. This paper describes these practices and discusses the most useful protective components. There is no need to reinvent the wheel — the current safety regulation models already in use can be adapted to work quite well for biometric technologies.

- Chemical safety regulations manage dangerous substances with administrative, procedural, and other meaningful, robust controls with clear accountability.
- The model for bans changes in these models. Bans exist, but are not ad hoc or political, nor are they are common. There are meaningful procedures to be followed that lead to a ban. These procedures are based in science, fact, meaningful regulatory oversight, and multistakeholder work. This work is non-adversarial.
- These regulatory models are in use globally.
- Africa, Asia, EU, US, India, and almost all other jurisdictions all have meaningful regulatory safety frameworks
- WHO and other global multilateral institutions track these types of safety regulations closely.

In short, there is a lot to learn from well-established chemical safety regulations, and much that can apply to face recognition systems and improve outcomes.

Article: Face Recognition Systems: Expanding solutions by using time-tested safety models to address face recognition risks (PDF, 9 pages)

Related Work:

A Failure to Do No Harm: India’s Aadhaar biometric ID program and its inability to protect privacy in relation to measures in Europe and the U.S. (Pam Dixon, Springer Nature, Health Technology. DOI 10.1007/s12553–017-0202-6. http://rdcu.be/tsWv. Open Access, via Harvard-Based Technology Science: https://techscience.org/a/2017082901/.
RADPA: Proceedings of the first Roundtable of African Data Protection Authorities: Status and response to privacy risks in Identity Systems (English) (Pam Dixon, rapporteur, ID4Africa event, June 2019.)
Africa’s Rising Leadership in Privacy / Le leadership croissant de l’Afrique en matière de vie privée
From ID4Africa: See Mauritius DPA and Morocco DPA discuss privacy and identity during COVID-19. Id4Africa livecast (recorded): Spotlight on Unique Digital Identity Numbers / Pleins feux sur les numèros d’identité uniques

Posted September 3, 2020 in Aadhaar, Africa, Biometrics, Data Ethics, Global privacy

New Report: Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new WPF report, “Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools.” This report sets out a definition of AI governance tools, documents why and how these tools are critically important for trustworthy AI, and where these tools are around the world. The report also documents problems in some AI governance tools themselves, and suggests pathways to improve AI governance tools and create an evaluative environment to measure their effectiveness. AI systems should not be deployed without simultaneously evaluating the potential adverse impacts of such systems and mitigating their risks, and most of the world agrees about the need to take precautions against the threats posed. The specific tools and techniques that exist to evaluate and measure AI systems for their inclusiveness, fairness, explainability, privacy, safety and other trustworthiness issues — called in the report collectively AI governance tools – can improve such issues. While some AI governance tools provide reassurance to the public and to regulators, the tools too often lack meaningful oversight and quality assessments. Incomplete or ineffective AI governance tools can create a false sense of confidence, cause unintended problems, and generally undermine the promise of AI systems. The report contains rich background details, use cases, potential solutions to the problems discussed in the report, and a global index of AI Governance Tools.
National IDs Around the World — Interactive map

About this Data Visualization: This interactive map displays the presence...
Report: From the Filing Cabinet to the Cloud: Updating the Privacy Act of 1974

This comprehensive report and proposed bill text is focused on the Privacy Act of 1974, an important and early Federal privacy law that applies to the government sector and some contractors. The Privacy Act was written for the 1970s information era -- an era that was characterized by the use of mainframe computers and filing cabinets. Today's digital information era looks much different than the '70s: smart phones are smarter than the old mainframes, and documents are now routinely digitized and stored and perhaps even analyzed in the cloud, among many other changes. The report focuses on why the Privacy Act needs an update that will bring it into this century, and how that could look and work. This work was written by Robert Gellman, and informed by a two-year multi-stakeholder process.

Expanding Solutions to Address the Risks of Face Recognition Systems

RADPA: Proceedings of the first Roundtable of African Data Protection Authorities: Status and response to privacy risks in Identity Systems (English) (Pam Dixon, rapporteur, ID4Africa event, June 2019.)

From ID4Africa: See Mauritius DPA and Morocco DPA discuss privacy and identity during COVID-19. Id4Africa livecast (recorded): Spotlight on Unique Digital Identity Numbers / Pleins feux sur les numèros d’identité uniques