Allegations of Bias in NZ Government's Passport Renewal System: An Incident of AI Governance

A New Zealand resident, Mr. K, recently faced issues with the renewal of his passport due to a failure in the facial recognition software used by the government. The software allegedly failed to recognize Mr. K's photo because of his ethnicity, sparking discussions on AI bias and fairness. This incident underscores the importance of responsible AI practices, particularly when handling sensitive data and making critical decisions.

Matched TAIM controls

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

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.487, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 3.5 — similarity 0.485, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.485, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/48

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.