The Hidden Costs of Facial Recognition.

Facial recognition has led to at least fifteen known wrongful arrests in the US, with nearly all victims Black, including Robert Williams (arrested in 2020 after an algorithm matched grainy footage to his driver’s licence), Porcha Woodruff (arrested in 2023 while eight months pregnant), Nijeer Parks (jailed ten days despite an alibi), and Robert Dillon (arrested in 2024 after a 93% confidence match and cleared months later).

Nina da Hora’s 2026 paper argues these harms are not mere errors but “computational epistemicide,” as the recognition pipeline (detection, cropping, landmarking, alignment to a historically white/European template, and embedding into vectors) erases the relational meaning of faces while amplifying demographic disparities shown in Gender Shades and NIST studies.

Despite EU and US regulatory moves, border, airport, and policing deployments are expanding, and even perfectly accurate systems would still convert persons into portable data artefacts that govern access and suspicion.