The Facial Recognition Vendor Is Not At Fault If You Don’t Upgrade Your Software

This is the second time that I’ve seen something like this, so I thought I’d bring attention to it.

Biometric Update recently published a story about an Australian agency that is no longer using Cognitec facial recognition software.

Why? Because the facial recognition software the agency has is not accurate enough.

Note “the facial recognition software the agency has.” There’s a story here.

Police and Counter-terrorism Minister Yasmin Catley clarifies that Cognitec has released numerous updates to the product since its deployment, but the police did not purchase them. As with other developers, Cognitec’s legacy algorithms have higher error rates for various demographic groups.

Important clarification.

Now perhaps the agency had its reasons for not upgrading the Cognitec software, and for using other software instead.

But governments and enterprises should not use old facial recognition software. Unless they have to run the software on computers running PC-DOS. Then they have other problems.

(A little aside: when I prompted Google Gemini to create the Imagen 3 image for this post, I asked it to create an image of a 1980s IBM PC running MS-DOS. Those in the know realize my prompt was incorrect. I should have requested a 1980s IBM PC running PC-DOS, not MS-DOS. PC-DOS was the version of MS-DOS that IBM licensed for its own computers, leaving Microsoft able to provide MS-DOS to the “clone computers” that eventually eclipsed IBM’s own offering.)