Israel's facial recognition technology is being used in casinos across the United States, raising concerns about how powerful surveillance tools the private sector will use.
Text | Thomas Brewster
Every day, thousands of faces appear on rows of surveillance screens in the security room of the River Spirit Casino in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Each face that appears is compared to the casino's no-entry surveillance list, which includes scammers, known criminals, and potentially disgruntled former employees who are waiting for trouble.
The casino's security system uses facial recognition technology from Israeli surveillance startup Oosto. The controversial company, formerly known as AnyVision, made headlines in major news outlets in 2019 for providing the Israeli government with technology to monitor the West Bank border.
Today, the company has changed its name and shifted its focus more to private companies, including casinos.
In July, a Forbes video producer watched the casino's surveillance center in action. Only to see a blue box appear on the head of a woman wearing a mask, and then the box turned green. The green box is a dangerous sign for the software, and although the woman covered her face, Oosto's facial recognition system still highly affirms that she is an undesirable person.
Travis Thompson, head of compliance and monitoring at bookmaker Muskee Nation Gaming Enterprises, pointed to the screen running Oosto's software and said, "She's definitely trying to hide her identity because our system gave her a high score." ”
After marking the software, he said, they personally check the person's identity. If the person is on the prohibited list, the staff will give him/her a form, remind them that they are not welcome here, tell them that they have appeared in the casino's facial recognition database, and then send them out of the casino.
The surveillance control room at Tulsa River Spirit Casino showed that Oosto technology was scanning faces. Image source: FORBES MEDIA
This surveillance technology is covering private and public places across the United States, and this powerful technology is not only in the hands of the police and the federal government, but also being sold to private institutions, whether casinos or retail stores.
While it's nothing more than a way to automate institutional security in the eyes of businesses, the privatization of tools that in the past was used primarily by intelligence and law enforcement agencies still scares privacy activists.
Jake Wiener, an attorney at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) who oversees domestic surveillance, said: "Selling facial recognition technology to private companies actually increases the risk of police misuse of the technology, as private companies sell or offer such technical rights to police." Facial recognition technology undermines people's privacy, and the more it is used, the easier it is to track people's movements in public and private spaces. ”
Still, Oosto wants to be the top supplier in this market, as there are plenty of private sectors in Europe and the United States that want to make their surveillance smoother. Since its inception in 2015, the company has raised $380 million from institutions such as SoftBank and Qualcomm Ventures.
In 2019, the Israeli media outlet Haaretz reported that the surveillance company had provided the Israeli military with tools to identify Palestinians on the West Bank border, after which Microsoft's financing arm, M12, withdrew its stake.
However, Oosto cited a so-called independent audit report on its use cases, saying its technology was not being used for mass surveillance activities, but rather for "access control" at the border, i.e. face comparisons as people traveled between the West Bank and Israel.
Since the above report, Oosto has changed its brand name and shifted its focus more to the private sector, as well as serving a wider geographic area. Currently, the company's technical services include American fans watching the game in their home country, visitors to india's Taj Mahal, visitors to Tel Aviv's private Rafael Hospital, and spectators entering the Australian Jockey Club in Sydney.
Casinos are a major component of Oosto's non-governmental business. The company claims to be serving some of the biggest casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, but says it can't provide names for customers in the "sin city."
It also offers facial recognition services for Les Ambassadeurs, a private casino located in Mayfair, London's upscale neighbourhood. There, Oosto's technology was used to spot criminals, as well as identify and serve VIP guests. But for ethical reasons, the owner of the River Spirit Casino decided not to use it to detect VIPs.
"We want our casino to have a customer-friendly atmosphere, so we don't want to make them feel like 'Big Brother' is staring at them all the time. That's not what our system is for here. Travis Thompson said.
He added that his casino's decision to adopt facial recognition technology was to support overwhelmed casino security personnel because they "have a hard time recognizing faces in person."
Travis Thompson, Head of Compliance and Monitoring at Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises
"In the past, this responsibility was shouldered by our security guards and floor personnel, who had to go out and remember who the bad guys were and who the bad actors were, and try to identify them in the sea of people every day."
Travis Thompson said his casino had worked with law enforcement, and that facial recognition system played a key role in keeping fraudsters in jail. He would not disclose specific cases, though common fraud in casinos includes using surveillance devices to cheat in poker and secretly placing bets on them.
While the casino says the technology will only be used to protect most innocent groups of customers, and that the latter's facial information won't be stored in its systems, critics of facial recognition technology say such measures aren't enough to protect people's privacy.
While police and government agencies are subject to freedom of information requirements and other forms of surveillance, private institutions are not subject to this restriction, and they have the right to place anyone on their own watch lists and to use this technology to send people to prison.
Jake Wiener said: "At the very least, Oosto should keep a record of searches and decisions. If a person is denied access to an event because of the technology, or is arrested for Oosto's identification, then that person should know how they were identified. ”
In addition to the creep factor that comes with scanning thousands of people's faces every day, the technology also has a history of failing to successfully detect non-white individuals. Previously, the system's facial recognition errors for blacks had led to wrongful arrests, and earlier this year, U.S. senators called on federal agencies to stop using the technology because it "poses a unique threat to blacks, other groups of color, and immigrant groups."
In a recent case, the Illinois Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) successfully forced a facial recognition company called Clearview AI to stop selling in the state or to private U.S. companies (the company has said it will not sell to U.S. NGOs).
Vermont and Portland, Oregon, have banned the use of facial recognition, so much so that police and private agencies in those places are unable to use the technology.
However, some bans will expire in the coming months. In California, police are currently banned from using facial recognition and biometric scanners in body cameras, but the ban is only valid until Next January; Virginia had banned police from using facial recognition technology, but then lifted it in July, though the state's new law only allows facial recognition products that "have at least 98 percent accuracy across all population groups."
Tulsa Riverside Casino is constantly scanning for blacklisted faces, and its surveillance system provider Oosto is planning to introduce behavioral and body part recognition in future software. Image source: FORBES MEDIA
Dean Nicolls, Oosto's chief marketing officer, said that bias has been overcome among major vendors to a large extent. "If you train ai on a group of middle-aged white men, it will be very good at identifying middle-aged white men, but it may not be very good at identifying African-American women." But these biases have largely been eliminated. If you look at all the major players in the field of facial recognition, you'll see that, from an age or race standpoint, they have almost no bias. ”
However, the company declined to provide any data showing how its technology performed in deviation tests. A study conducted last year by the Department of Homeland Security found that the best algorithms detect faces more than 95 percent accurately, regardless of skin color, but overall, the technology still performs better than any other group of white men.
Dean Nicolls says Oosto isn't just focused on facial recognition, it also plans to move into the equally controversial field of behavior recognition. While there is growing evidence that software can recognize faces with greater than 90 percent accuracy, it has not been proven that code can determine whether a person will perform risky behaviors or determine their mental state by analyzing their movement patterns.
Previously, Forbes reported on a number of companies that conduct emotion detection and prediction, and Meredith Whittaker, co-founder of research institute AI Now, slammed the technology as "not having a sound scientific consensus."
Last year, Forbes reported on a patent from Oosto that applies its facial recognition technology to drones, enabling aerial surveillance. However, the company has yet to put the technology into practice.
If Oosto also intends to continue to push for the viability of surveillance technology, it will encounter stricter technical and ethical barriers.
When Microsoft decided to part ways with the tech company in 2020, although former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had determined that the investment did not violate any of the former's ethical policies, the move also made clear the risks of participating in the spread of the technology. As the two sides said in a joint statement at the time: "From Microsoft's perspective, the audit process reinforces the challenge of being a minority investor in a company that sells sensitive technologies." ”
Subsequently, Oosto announced that it would no longer accept minority investments in the facial recognition business. ■
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