Reason: ACLU Sues After Facial Recognition Falsely Identifies Florida Man as a Child Abductor
Police arrested a man in Florida for attempted child abduction in a town he had never visited, and the only evidence linking him to the crime was an AI facial recognition hit. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he is now suing the officers and agencies who put him through it.
In November 2023, police in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, responded to a call about an attempted child abduction at a McDonald’s. Witnesses said an adult man allegedly tried to get the child, identified as a girl under 12 years old, to leave the restaurant with him. According to a police report, facial recognition software concluded with 93 percent confidence that the suspect was Robert Dillon.
In August 2024, Deputies arrested Dillon at his home in Fort Myers, Florida—hundreds of miles away, at the opposite end of the state. “Are you shitting me, man?” Dillon asked the arresting deputy. “I haven’t been out of Fort Myers in two years.”
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Despite the glaring errors facial recognition technology frequently makes, it’ll be touted as the greatest law enforcement tool ever invented. And near certain to be used as a shortcut to actual police and detective work. In theory, it can only be reliable if it has a database with pictures of every single face in the world taken at every conceivable angle. The size of such a database alone and the impossibility of keeping it current indicate that the technology will never improve.
The other sad part of this case is that if this guy relied on a public defender, the PD would have just tried to get him to plea out and wouldn’t have bothered to prove that he was at work on the other side of the state that day.