BiasHigh
Amazon's Rekognition Falsely Matched Members of Congress to Mugshots
- Occurred
- Jul 26, 2018
- Published
- Jul 26, 2018
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Rekognition's face comparison feature was shown by the ACLU to have misidentified members of congress, and particularly members of colors, as other people who have been arrested using a mugshot database built on publicly available arrest photos.
Developers
- Amazon
Deployers
- Amazon
Harmed parties
- Rekognition users
- arrested people
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: System misidentified members of Congress, especially people of color, as criminals, demonstrating discriminatory bias.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8