Should we or shouldn’t we impose facial recognition technology or biometric identification over our citizenry? US government agencies are at loggerheads!
Washington Post reports that the General Services Administration (GSA), the US government’s central management office, has refused to use facial recognition in their popular login.gov secure login service. Meanwhile, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and other federal agencies are pushing to require Americans to consent to facial recognition to sign on to government websites.
The GSA, which oversees federal offices and technology, says the face-scanning technology has too many problems to justify its use as an identity verification service.
Last year, the Treasury Department awarded a two-year, $86 million contract to a private contractor, ID.me, that would require taxpayers to send in video scans of their faces before they can verify their identities and access their tax records online. The plan is scheduled to go into effect this summer.
The contract stirred a firestorm because facial recognition systems are unregulated in the United States and have been shown in federal tests to work less accurately for people with darker skin. Members of Congress and privacy advocates have also voiced concern that the systems could undermine Americans’ privacy rights or unfairly disadvantage people without access to a smartphone, laptop camera or the Internet.
The GSA’s Login.gov already provides sign-in services to 200 websites run by 28 federal agencies and has been used by more than 40 million people. It was built and operated by government employees to accomplish the same tasks as ID.me by relying on more traditional identity verification methods, such as scanning government records and credit reports.
The GSA’s opposition to the use of facial recognition technology underscores a wider tension within the federal government over a technology that is rapidly gaining adoption amid promises it will boost security and combat fraud, despite many questions about its accuracy and the lack of government regulations governing its use.
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