New York Detective Misused Woody Harrelson's Face to Perform Face Recognition Search

April 28, 2017

A New York City detective misused facial recognition technology in an attempt to identify a CVS theft suspect, using Woody Harrelson's face due to its resemblance to the suspect. This unconventional method led to the arrest of an innocent individual.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.628, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.627, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.617, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: new-york-police-department, facial-identification-section
Alleged developer: unknown
Alleged harmed parties: unknown

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/518

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.