Incident 114: Amazon's Rekognition Falsely Matched Members of Congress to Mugshots

Description: Rekognition's face comparison feature was shown by the ACLU to have misidentified members of congress, and particularly members of colors, as other people who have been arrested using a mugshot database built on publicly available arrest photos.

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Alleged: Amazon developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Rekognition users and arrested people.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
114
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2018-07-26
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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