IBM quits facial recognition tech because Black Lives Matter
- Reference: 1591686088
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/06/09/ibm_quits_facial_recognition_tech/
- Source link:
News that Big Blue has binned the products came in a [1]letter penned by CEO Arvind Krishna and sent to two US senators and three members of the house that references IBM’s past actions to create an inclusive workplace, but lamenting that “the horrible and tragic deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and too many others remind us that the fight against racism is as urgent as ever.”
Krishna therefore offered that IBM will “work with Congress in pursuit of justice and racial equity” and suggested “responsible technology policies” as one measure to advance the cause. His definition of “responsible” is that tech “must not promote discrimination or racial injustice.”
IBM appears to have made a change to walk the talk.
“IBM no longer offers general purpose IBM facial recognition or analysis software,” Krishna wrote.
“IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency. We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies.
“Artificial Intelligence is a powerful tool that can help law enforcement keep citizens safe. But vendors and users of Al systems have a shared responsibility to ensure that Al is tested for bias, particularity when used in law enforcement, and that such bias testing is audited and reported.”
Krishan also called for reform of police – and a database to record police misconduct - and for Congress to consider more programmes that help communities of colour access education opportunities that lead to jobs in tech. He offered two IBM initiatives as fine exemplars of such programmes.
IBM’s anti-surveillance stance marks it out from some rivals, notably Clearview AI.
But The Register would be remiss if we did not point out that IBM’s facial recognition tech has been far from colour-blind in the past. The company was rated [2]the worst performed in a test of three facial recognition software packages. As we reported in early 2018, “IBM struggled the most with darker skin tones. The results report error rates of 0.3 per cent for white males, 7.1 per cent for white females, 12 per cent for black males and 34.7 per for black females.”
The company has also been [3]criticised and sued over its use of Creative-Commons-licenced images for a facial recognition training dataset that it offered as more diverse than previous such collections. ®
Sponsored: [4]Running Your Modern .NET Application on Kubernetes
[1] https://www.ibm.com/blogs/policy/facial-recognition-susset-racial-justice-reforms/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2018/02/13/facial_recognition_software_is_better_at_white_men_than_black_women/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/27/ibms_facial_recognition_software_gets_it_in_trouble_again/
[4] https://go.theregister.com/tl/1956/-8477/running-your-modern-net-application-on-kubernetes?td=wptl1956
The the inclusive workplace with a dark history.
Not that you'd know it from their centennial presentation I saw when I was there. It trundled along a time line through their history, got to 1939, and they must have had a scant few years as the next year covered was 1950!
1940-50, pretty much everything was government work in ordnance manufacturing or secret.
Was the 1933 German census mentioned at all? that was very useful collating lists of 'undesirables'.
IBM were busy helping crack Japanese ciphers...
It's easy to point the finger at IBM, but a huge amount of the US was either sympathetic or apathetic to Nazi Germany. Many companies were dealing with the Nazi government.
Had Japan not attacked the US and Germany not declared war on the US, it's unlikely the US would have ever entered thee war.
Maybe a prudent strategy for the over 40s at IBM is to start recommending IBM.
Nobody ever gets fired for recommending IBM...or so I've heard.
Or...
...our facial recognition software is crap and here's how we could use the death of a person to our advantage...by lobbying politicians to not use other companies' software until ours is better.
Re: Or...
Hey, if it gets results. This and masks means the panopticon's held at bay for a few more years.
Re: Or...
...it might not improve though as they will have just RA'd everyone in the facial recognition business unit.
I hate stories like this
You get all revved up to blast the company for their bad habits then they do something like this which may not fix all their issues but is a positive step
Of course, it could be said that with their challenges to get this working they know just how bad it can be so are ideally placed to be a Subject Matter Expert for the failings in facial recognition.
So, so conflicted about them now
Krishan also called for reform of police – and a database to record police misconduct
Says the vendor of a commercial enterprise-class DBMS.
The world is saved!
While IBM's facial recognition software has never been great^H^H^H meh (maybe "great" is too high a bar for facial recognition...) at least it didn't beat suspects into submission for petty "crimes" or turn the economically disadvantaged into criminals. At least not yet. There's a chance it might help. But it's a cost for IBM so lets get rid of it.
On the other hand, you have IBM's employment practices. Over 40? Check. Discard. Bills to pay? Can't pay your car registration or your licence expired a week or two ago? Congratulations, you've won some quality time with your local Police department. Maybe you just get a warning. Or maybe this is the start of your descent into the criminal "justice" system where every step takes you further away from a job.
IBM - cutting costs, not executive bonuses.
Good on IBM
I will applaud any company that faces the reality that facial recog simply does not work in public areas. The error rate is way too high.
So yeah, let's say that IBM is throwing in the towel at the opportune moment, I don't care. On this, the CEO is right and has made the right call.
Let's see what comes of it.
Given IBM has sold off most of it's software business it's no surprise they want to shutter a piece of software that was pretty much rubbish when it came to facial recognition using the BLM movement to hide a commercial decision as something altruistic. IBM's management has no plays left in their playbook except to cut staff and to sell off what they can to try and prop up the share price. Customers have worked out they are getting crap service from our offshore teams, there's not enough of us locals to put out the fires anymore and they can get the same crap service from TCS or Wipro at a cheaper rate than what IBM charges.
I was given the chop in the most recent layoffs and every one of the people I know who are being RA'd were over 50, not a single person under 40 appears to have been cut in this round which statistically speaking doesn't match normal layoff age ranges unless they are targeting specific age groups.
With the sale of BigFix we've been directed to stop using it and to only use standard vendor tools provided by Microsoft and co. With the acquisition of Red Hat we've been told Ansible is the strategic direction for deployment and patch management - dumped the infrastructure in place and told to work out how to replace the existing tools ourselves. I did of course, my offshore colleagues are expecting me to spoon feed them on how to manage and deploy but this time around I have no interest or intention of doing so as I had done with BigFix and every other tool we used.
The inclusive workplace that fires people over 40. Good work.