Students protest universities’ use of facial recognition

Students at universities across the United States participated in protests to demand their institutions refrain from using facial recognition on campus, writes Kari Paul for The Guardian.

The protests came after pushback led by students and digital rights group Fight for The Future against a proposed facial recognition programme at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) led the school to reverse course and drop the technology. Students at around a dozen universities staged protests on campus in person this week, while 36 universities saw online actions including petitions.

In 2019, UCLA administrators proposed using facial recognition software for security surveillance on campus. In a campaign against the programme, Fight for the Future ran facial recognition technology on more than 400 photos of UCLA faculty members and athletes and found the software incorrectly matched 58 of those with photos in a mugshot database. The majority of those misidentified by the database were people of colour.
Full report on The Guardian site