Facial Recognition

The team that brings you In Machines We Trust has much to be grateful for—a brand new season of this show, a big awards nomination for The Extortion Economy, a show about ransomware that we made with ProPublica, and our new investigative series, Curious Coincidence.

We celebrate how far we've come with a look back at where it all started!

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What happens when an algorithm gets it wrong? In the first of a four-part series on face recognition, Jennifer Strong and the team at MIT Technology Review explore the arrest of a man who was falsely accused of a crime using facial recognition. The episode also starts to unpack the complexities of this technology and introduce some thorny questions about its use.  

We meet: 

Robert and Melissa Williams 

Peter Fussey, University of Essex

Hamid Khan, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition

Credits: This episode was reported and produced by Jennifer Strong, Tate Ryan-Mosley and Emma Cillekens. We had help from Karen Hao and Benji Rosen. We’re edited by Michael Reilly and Gideon Lichfield. Our technical director is Jacob Gorski. Special thanks to Kyle Thomas Hemingway and Eric Mongeon.