It’s time to recognize the Achilles’ heel of law enforcement’s facial-recognition dreams

“Garbage in, garbage out” is one of the most important principles in computer science, but many people seem unable to internalize it. Maybe it’s the power of marketing; maybe it’s the decades-old “let’s enhance” trope in popular entertainment, or maybe it’s the old Arthur C. Clarke observation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”—whatever the reason, it’s not unusual for folks to assume that a fancy computer system will always have valuable outputs, regardless of the quality of the inputs.

When it comes to facial recognition, the failure to grok GIGO can have tragic outcomes. I wrote about this a month ago, when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) banned Rite Aid from using such systems for five years—largely thanks to low-quality imagery, the drugstore chain often falsely accused people of being shoplifters, with harmful, humiliating consequences.

Now, as the Guardian reports, a Texas man has made some particularly horrific allegations about treatment he alleges was the result of bad facial recognition—again, thanks to low-quality imagery.

Harvey Eugene Murphy Jr is suing Macy’s and Sunglass Hut parent EssilorLuxottica for falsely identifying him as the perpetrator of a Houston store robbery that took place in 2022 when he was living in California. Murphy was arrested last October and released a couple of weeks later after his alibi was confirmed—and, he claims, after he was beaten and gang-raped in jail. “All of this happened to Murphy because the Defendants relied on facial recognition technology that is known to be error prone and faulty,” the suit states.

Using grainy pictures to wreck people’s lives is bad enough, but a startling Wired article yesterday detailed some truly next-level misplaced faith in technology’s ability to solve crimes.

There’s a company called Parabon NanoLabs that uses machine learning to transmogrify DNA samples into a 3D rendering of a person’s face. To Parabon’s credit, the company seems cautious about making overly wild claims about the accuracy of its results—it told Wired that it generates rough predictions rather than anything that can be used for “individual identifications”—but some of its law-enforcement clients seem to think the renderings can then be fed into facial recognition systems to help crack cases. At least one homicide detective made such a request; several officers told the publication they think the method is worth considering.

As Electronic Frontier Foundation general counsel Jennifer Lynch commented in the piece, “There’s no real evidence that Parabon can accurately produce a face in the first place,” so running its renderings through facial-recognition systems “puts people at risk of being a suspect for a crime they didn’t commit.”

So sure, let’s enhance, but let’s also be deeply skeptical of the results. It’s a good thing that U.S. lawmakers are now pushing for more scrutiny of the impact of police facial recognition on people’s civil rights.

More news below, but do check out Term Sheet writer Allie Garfinkle’s interview with Keith Rabois, in which the VC bigs up Miami and slams Silicon Valley—and Stanford grads, of which he is one. Also recommended: Eleanor Pringle’s piece on YouTube sensation MrBeast puncturing the revenue hype around his first X video post.

David Meyer

Want to send thoughts or suggestions to Data Sheet? Drop a line here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com