https://www.wired.com/story/parabon-nanolabs-dna-face-models-police-facial-recognition/
"Leaked records reveal what appears to be the first known instance of a police department attempting to use facial recognition on a face generated from crime-scene DNA. It likely won’t be the last."
"Parabon’s methods have not been peer-reviewed, and scientists are skeptical about how feasible predicting face shape even is."
"“Daisy chaining unreliable or imprecise black-box tools together is simply going to produce unreliable results,” she says."
"In a controversial 2017 decision, the department published the predicted face in an attempt to solicit tips from the public. Then, in 2020, one of the detectives did something civil liberties experts say is even more problematic—and a violation of Parabon NanoLabs’ terms of service: He asked to have the rendering run through facial recognition software."
"For facial recognition experts and privacy advocates, the East Bay detective’s request, while dystopian, was also entirely predictable. It emphasizes the ways that, without oversight, law enforcement is able to mix and match technologies in unintended ways, using untested algorithms to single out suspects based on unknowable criteria."
"“It’s really just junk science to consider something like this,” Jennifer Lynch, general counsel at civil liberties nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells WIRED. Running facial recognition with unreliable inputs, like an algorithmically generated face, is more likely to misidentify a suspect than provide law enforcement with a useful lead, she argues. “There’s no real evidence that Parabon can accurately produce a face in the first place,” Lynch says. “It’s very dangerous, because it puts people at risk of being a suspect for a crime they didn’t commit.”"
