The Infinite Brief

For example, DHS is reportedly developing a massive new biometric and biographic database with extensive data on citizens and foreigners alike. The Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) database will reportedly include at least seven biometric identifiers, including face and voice data, tattoos, DNA, scars, and other “physical descriptors” on as many as 500 million people.

As of 2015, the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) database held records on nearly one-third of the American population, including 52 million mugshots.

Last month, Amazon announced it is selling its facial recognition software, known as Rekognition, to local police departments all over the country.

This all amounts to a gross violation of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties — and in no small part because these technologies are not only abusively obtrusive, but often wrong.

Researchers at MIT have found that these devices and software are essentially useless when it comes to recognizing the face of a person of color. There’s a 12 percent chance the device cannot even recognize the person’s gender, let alone their exact identity, if they are of darker complexion.