NAS Facial Recognition Report (2024)

Facial recognition technology (FRT) is an increasingly prevalent tool for automated identification and identity verification of individuals. Its speed and accuracy have improved dramatically in the past decade. Its use speeds up identification tasks that would otherwise need to be performed manually in a slower or more labor-intensive way and, in many use cases, makes identification tasks practical that would be entirely infeasible without the use of these tools.

The attributes of FRT make it very useful in a number of identity verification and identification applications. At the same time, FRT raises significant equity, privacy, and civil liberties concerns that merit attention by organizations that develop, deploy, and evaluate FRT—as well as government agencies, legislatures, state and federal courts, and civil society organizations. These concerns arise from such factors as FRT’s low cost and ease of deployment, its ability to be used by inexperienced and inadequately trained operators, its potential for surveillance and covert use, the widespread availability of personal information that can be associated with a face image, and the observed differences in false negative (FN) and false positive (FP) match rates across phenotypes and demographic groups.

Read the online version of "Facial Recognition Technology: Current Capabilities, Future Prospects, and Governance (2024)" or download the PDF below