A group of American senators has urged the U.S. Department of Labor to reexamine or drop its partnership with facial-recognition vendor ID.me.
Facial recognition should not be required to access unemployment insurance or any other essential government services. After successfully pushing the IRS to transition away from its use of private facial recognition, now I’m pushing the Department of Labor to do the same. pic.twitter.com/SLfFlA7XD2
— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) February 15, 2022
In an open letter, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden and Sherrod Brown criticized the company for a lack of transparency. They urged the department to help states explore alternatives to verifying people applying for unemployment benefits.
According to the lawmakers, many state and federal agencies have outsourced much of their core technology infrastructure to the private sector.
“What is especially troubling is that one of the best-known providers in this space, ID.me, not only uses facial recognition and does not provide transparency about its processes and results, but also often forces users to endure lengthy manual checks after the automated scanning failed to recognise them,” the senators wrote.
The lawmakers urged the department to work with the U.S. General Services Administration to build a secure citizen-verification system. They also proposed making the login.gov service available to states.
Earlier in February, ID.me confirmed that it uses identity verification on a “1 to many” basis, although previously the company had claimed to use a “1 to 1” system.
Against this backdrop, a number of lawmakers and civil rights advocates urged government agencies to sever ties with ID.me. In response, the company объявила that facial recognition would be optional for government-sector partners and that users would be allowed to delete their data.
Privacy experts welcomed the concessions from ID.me’s leadership. However, they noted that the root problem lies not in the facial-recognition technology itself but in outsourcing access to core government services to external contractors.
Earlier in February, senators urged the IRS not to use the ID.me facial-recognition system.
A day later, the agency said it would not implement biometric verification of taxpayers. The General Services Administration also decided not to use the ID.me facial-recognition system.
In June 2021, due to errors in the ID.me facial-recognition system, many Americans lost unemployment benefits.
Subscribe to ForkLog News on Telegram: ForkLog AI — all the news from the world of AI!