Facial recognition technology is being implemented in some schools across Michigan, including the Detroit Public Schools Community District. It's using Visitor Aware, a facial recognition technology meant to identify and verify visitors.
The parent company of the technology, Singlewire Software, said the benefit of facial recognition is safer schools. According to a spokesperson from the company, the technology helps school staff identify potential threats before they gain access to a building, and offers an accurate log of who was in their building at a given time, which school leaders are able to reference.
But some critics are concerned about potential consequences of using facial recognition at schools.
Molly Kleinman is the Managing Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. She said the technology is mostly trained on white adult male faces, and doesn’t work as well on individuals who are gender nonconforming, people with disabilities, and people of color.
A research report published by Kleinman and her colleagues found that this bias exacerbates racism.
Visitor Aware requires school visitors to check in at a kiosk that scans their ID and verifies their identity when they enter. Then, if there are no issues, visitors get a printed badge to show they went through the screening process and are cleared to go in.
Kleinman said she’s concerned about this approach because it could discourage parents from visiting the school and getting involved in the school community.
“We know from research that when there's a big law enforcement presence at a school, for example, immigrant parents stay away,” Kleinman said. “We also know that parental involvement is one of the big indicators of student success in school.”
Singlewire said Visitor Aware is designed to screen against the National Sex Offender Registry and FBI databases, but doesn’t do a general criminal background check. To prevent false alarms, the technology makes sure people are flagged only when there’s a high certainty their information matches official data bases.
Deciding whether to let a visitor who’s been flagged to enter a school or not is up to each individual district, the company said.
Kleinman said she’s concerned about the data gathered from facial recognition being shared. “You only have one face,” she said. Once your facial data is out there, there's no getting it back.”
According to Singlewire, data from facial recognition is stored securely in encrypted databases, and guest information is completely destroyed from check-in devices after each check-in.
“Information is never sold, transferred, or accessible to any person or service outside Visitor Aware,” a Singlewire spokesperson said.
Kleinman argued facial recognition brings an element of surveillance into schools without the technology being entirely accurate.
“We strongly believe in protecting student privacy,” Singlewire said. “Visitor Aware does not collect facial recognition data from students. Facial recognition is used only for visitors to verify their identities.”
The Detroit Public Schools Community District did not respond to a request for comment.
“I understand that people are concerned about school safety and school security,” Kleinman said. “But this is trying to use a simple technical fix for really a much more complicated social problem.”
Kleinman advised schools to instead focus on investing in larger scale, social- and human-based solutions, like having more staffing and support systems in place.
“Having more eyes on the hallway, having more people in the office who can build up relationships and get to know the families of students, that's a big part of it,” she said.
But Kleinman said there’s also many problems facing schools that they can’t solve by themselves, with or without facial recognition technology — including too-easy access to guns.
