Saving Face: Investigating the Ethical Concerns of Facial Recognition Auditing Inioluwa Deborah Raji Timnit Gebru Margaret Mitchell University of Toronto Google Research Google Research Canada United States United States
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Joy Buolamwini Joonseok Lee Emily Denton MIT Media Lab. Google Research Google Research United States United States United States
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT the positive uses of this technology includes claims of “understand- Although essential to revealing biased performance, well inten- ing users”, “monitoring or detecting human activity”, “indexing and tioned attempts at algorithmic auditing can have effects that may searching digital image libraries”, and verifying and identifying harm the very populations these measures are meant to protect. subjects “in security scenarios” [1, 8, 16, 33]. This concern is even more salient while auditing biometric sys- The reality of FPT deployments, however, reveals that many tems such as facial recognition, where the data is sensitive and of these uses are quite vulnerable to abuse, especially when used the technology is often used in ethically questionable manners. for surveillance and coupled with predatory data collection prac- We demonstrate a set of five ethical concerns in the particular case tices that, intentionally or unintentionally, discriminate against of auditing commercial facial processing technology, highlighting marginalized groups [2]. The stakes are particularly high when additional design considerations and ethical tensions the auditor we consider companies like Amazon and HireVue, who are selling needs to be aware of so as not exacerbate or complement the harms their services to police departments or using the technology to help propagated by the audited system.