Meta agrees to $1.4B settlement with Texas over privacy lawsuit
Meta has reached a record $1.4B settlement with Texas over allegations it used its facial recognition software on photos without consent.
Straight Arrow News
- Milwaukee Police Department is proposing trading 2.5 million jail records for facial recognition technology access with the company Biometrica.
- Police say acquiring the technology will lead to higher clearance rate of cases and improve the speed at which crimes are solved. Officials say it will not be used alone to establish probable cause.
- Activists and residents have concerns over the impact to privacy and add to growing surveillance tech in the city. Some are concerned how federal agencies could access it as well.
Milwaukee police are mulling a trade: 2.5 million mugshots for free use of facial recognition technology.
Officials from the Milwaukee Police Department say swapping the photos with the software firm Biometrica will lead to quicker arrests and solving of crimes. But that benefit is unpersuasive for those who say the trade is startling, due to the concerns of the surveillance of city residents and possible federal agency access.
“We recognize the very delicate balance between advancement in technology and ensuring we as a department do not violate the rights of all of those in this diverse community,” Milwaukee Police Chief of Staff Heather Hough said during an April 17 meeting.
For the first time, Milwaukee police officials detailed their plans to use the facial recognition technology during a meeting of the city’s Fire and Police Commission, the oversight body for those departments. In the past, the department relied on facial recognition technology belonging to neighboring police agencies
In an April 24 email, Hough said the department has not entered into an agreement with any facial recognition and the department intends to continue engaging the public before doing so. The department will discuss it at a future meeting of the city’s Public Safety and Health Committee next, she said.
“While we would like to acquire the technology to assist in solving cases, being transparent with the community that we serve far outweighs the urgency to acquire,” she said in an email.
Officials said the technology alone could not be used as probable cause to arrest someone and the only authorized uses would be when there’s basis to believe criminal activity has happened or could happen, or a threat to public safety is imminent.
Hough said the department intended to craft a policy that would ensure no one is arrested solely based on facial recognition matches.
That reassurance and others from police officials came as activists, residents and some public officials voiced concern.
Concerns ranged from studies which show bias in the technology; its potential use by federal agencies like Immigration Customs Enforcement; and infringement on civil liberties. Many speakers noted cities, including Madison, have banned facial recognition’s use by city agencies.
Aurelia Ceja said the discrepancy in the information police release on themselves — noting that officers involved in shootings don’t have their names released — compared to the amount of information the police have on residents is a concern.
“First and foremost, (I’m) inherently against any sort of surveillance technology used by the police” said Ceja, a member of the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression in an interview with the Journal Sentinel.
At the meeting, officials shared how the technology had been used in recent cases — a homicide and a sexual assault — to assist in identifying suspects. In both cases, police ran photos of men ultimately charged in the crimes through facial recognition technology to help identify them. Those identifications were then confirmed during the investigation, police said.
The company the department is exploring working with is Biometrica, a company which began with working in the gambling industry in the late ’90s. The police presentation said it does not retain data, such as photos of possible suspects, which the police put into its system to check for matches. In exchange for the initial 2.5 million jail records, the company is offering two free search licenses, with any additional licenses costing $12,000 each.
Biometrica did not respond to a request for comment.
Fire and Police Commissioner Krissie Fung, who was recently appointed to the oversight body, said in an interview she was unconvinced by the proposal to use the technology at this time. Use of facial recognition should be determined by residents, she said.
Fung, like other speakers at the meeting, were concerned with adopting the technology in the current political environment under President Donald Trump. She said the IRS agreeing to share data with Immigration Customs Enforcement as an example.
“I did not get the sense that there are clear protections against federal entities being able to access this facial recognition data either through MPD or the company they will use,” she said.
A spokesperson for Mayor Cavalier Johnson declined comment on his support for the police acquiring the technology.
A commissioner cites own experience with bias in facial recognition
During the April 17 meeting, Fire and Police commissioner Ramon Evans said he had been subject to bias by facial recognition while at Potawatomi Casino.
“I got called over and I wasn’t the guy,” he said. “I was a victim of error.”
That anecdote followed nearly 90 minutes of public comment from attendees, many who cited concerns over bias from the technology. For years, the technology’s issues with identifying faces of Black and Brown people, and other minorities, has been well publicized.
Police officials also said Biometrica offers training for racial bias in the technology.
Last year, a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report found the technology has been rapidly adopted by federal agencies with little oversight and raised particular risks for people of color and women. The report also found the U.S. Justice Department had awarded $4.2 million to local police for programs used, in part, for facial recognition.
The technology’s capabilities and shortcomings are changing quickly, as evidenced by research from Thaddeus Johnson, an assistant professor at the Andrew Young School of Public Studies at Georgia State University. A former police captain in Memphis, he studies facial recognition and published a study in 2022 noting it contributed to greater racial disparities in arrests.
But, as he continued his research, the findings became more complicated.
In a 2024 study, Johnson found departments which use facial recognition technology saw lower rates of felony violence and homicides without contributing to disparities or over-arrests. In a review of the 2022 work that followed, Johnson found it led to higher disparities when used specifically on property crimes.
Now, he believes it makes sense for departments to use it for crimes like homicides, but not for things like theft and robbery.
Both of his studies focused on the outcomes of departments that used facial recognition. It did not examine how the tool was being used, like whether it focused on a specific neighborhood or crime type.
Johnson said facial recognition technology has improved greatly since his studies began; however, it still has large gaps between its effectiveness in perfect environments — portrait-like photos taken and analyzed — compared to those taken in everyday environments.
He believed police misuse of facial recognition was at greater fault for issues than the technology itself.
“It’s not a magic bullet. It can if not used carefully, exacerbate these disparities,” he said.
Facial recognition technology would only be the latest police technology in Milwaukee
The facial recognition proposal prompted backlash before it even began, with concerns over the growth of past police technology cited as a factor.
In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin asked the Milwaukee Common Council to adopt a two-year pause on any new surveillance technology and to develop and pass policy regulating existing technology. It also asked the council to incorporate community input through a public body called citizen control over police surveillance, or CCOPS for short.
It’s the second technology the Milwaukee Police has announced plans for in the last month. The police announced plans for creating a drone team in March and whether its footage could be incorporated into facial recognition was scrutinized. The department’s recently adopted policy prohibits it.
In recent years, the department also announced programs where residents can share surveillance footage with the police. The police also use a technology known as FLOCK cameras, which reads license plate numbers, and has grown across the greater-Milwaukee area in recent years.
“We are already seeing how surveillance technology is being weaponized in real time,” the ACLU’s statement said. “While we trust that our local leaders and police officers may have good intentions, history reminds us how quickly larger systems can override those intentions.”
David Clarey is a public safety reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He can be reached at dclarey@gannett.com.
