Facial recognition and Entrenching Racial Discrimination

The Promise Institute for Human Rights and Institute for Technology, Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law present a series on Global Digital Rights Challenges.

Alternating Thursdays: June 17, 2021 – August 12, 2021

August 12, 12pm PT Session: Facial Recognition and Entrenching Racial Discrimination

As new technologies are integrated into law enforcement, there are growing concerns about their potential to reinforce and entrench existing paradigms of discrimination. The enormous power of modern surveillance tools, particularly facial recognition, is itself a game-changing development, which requires a fundamental reconsideration of police oversight and accountability. However, the mainstreaming of these technologies is even more alarming in light of their tendency to amplify racist structures, and to generate disproportionate negative impacts among racialized communities. Despite ongoing attempts to grapple with the broader legacies of systemic racism, police forces across the country are charging forward in their implementation of facial recognition and other algorithmic policing tools, effectively doubling down on the problem.

This conversation features two leading voices on race and technology, Safiya Noble of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and Tawana Petty of Data for Black Lives, who will discuss the challenges posed by the spread of facial recognition, and avenues ahead for bringing accountability and oversight into the implementation of these powerful new tools.

• Speakers: Safiya Noble, UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2) and Tawana Petty, Data for Black Lives
• Moderator: Jess Peake, Promise Institute for Human Rights

Register at globaldigitalrightschallenges.eventbrite.com

About the series:

Around the world, repressive governments are seeking new and innovative ways to port censorship to the online space, while private sector tech companies increasingly find themselves responsible for making policy on the counters of global speech. Here at home, digital technologies have also become the latest front for debates on systemic racism, and the potential for new technologies to entrench patterns of discrimination. This series, which features global activists on the frontlines of these debates, will examine the pressing digital rights challenges manifesting around the world.