Newark schools are getting a dose of artificial intelligence this summer. More than 7,000 cameras equipped with A-I will be installed in the schools at a cost of $12 million.
School officials say the systems are aimed at making schools safer, but others say they could invade students’ privacy or misidentify students.
“A lot of these face recognition systems, how they’re built and developed, is that they learn how to identify faces and differentiate between one person’s face and the other based on seeing examples of faces,” said Dillon Reisman, a lawyer with the ACLU of New Jersey.
“This is a process called training. What ends up happening is that a lot of the people who develop these systems really only give them examples of lighter skinned people’s faces, men’s faces. This has been a long understood problem in the sort of space of people who develop these tools,” said Reisman.
He said this kind of misidentification can have serious consequences for students. “These systems open the door to all kinds of punishment and student monitoring and discipline that weren’t possible before,” said Reisman.
Even when they work the way they were intended, the effects on student life are profound, he said. “These systems can greatly infringe on students’ ability to lead kind of free and socially and emotionally healthy lives at school,” said Reisman.
“Parents and teachers and administrators should ask themselves if is it acceptable to punish a student for who they spend their time with, who they walk the halls with, and that might sound extreme and people might say, ‘That’s not what we’re doing,’ but that is what this system is capable of and students are going to be aware of that,” Reisman said.
Newark public schools spokesperson Nancy Deering responded by saying only that “our utmost priority continues to be the safety and security of students and staff, and not to invade anyone’s privacy.”
The goal is for the new cameras to be installed by Aug. 31, before the start of the new school year. There will be roughly 7,700 cameras —- about one for every five students.