State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Police have been feeding celebrity photos, doctored images into facial-recognition systems

StateScoop: Law enforcement agencies around the country have been feeding artist sketches, distorted images and photos of celebrities into their facial-recognition systems to generate matches while searching for criminal suspects, according to new research released Thursday.

Facial recognition tools, which the city of San Francisco banned police and other government agencies from using on Tuesday, have grown increasingly common in airports and law enforcement agencies in recent years, but remain mostly unregulated, according to a report by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology, which argues that this shortage of rules has allowed law enforcement to abuse these tools.

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