GSA’s Equity Action Plan Entails Facial Recognition Scrutiny

The US General Services Administration (GSA) is taking itself to task for failing to provide the public with accessible services. To address the problem, the organization has published a new Equity Action Plan that details some of its own shortcomings, and lays out concrete steps that the agency will take to address its problems.

In that regard, the Plan acknowledges that public-facing portals like the GSA’s Login.gov platform have not been designed with accessibility in mind. Such systems often prioritize security and compliance in the most technical sense, and do not account for usability, or provide people with the support they might need to navigate such a system.

As a result, the GSA argues that the people who rely on government services are often the people who cannot get them because they struggle to use the tools that have been provided. The agency specifically called attention to elderly users and those living in poverty, who either do not have or do not know how to use modern smartphones and computers. Blind people similarly require accessibility features like screen readers that are seldom accounted for in the design of government websites.

With that in mind, the GSA is pledging to improve its testing practices to make sure that groups that have historically been overlooked are adequately represented in the design process. That also means that the GSA will revisit its approach to facial recognition. The GSA noted that facial recognition algorithms are often less accurate when asked to identify Black Americans, and false rejections have the effect of barring citizens from government assistance programs.

Unfortunately, the GSA did not provide as much information about what it will do to address that bias moving forward, saying only that it would conduct research studies to learn more about bias in facial recognition. It will also take bias into account in the guidelines that it publishes for other government agencies, which could affect procurement decisions if the GSA encourages federal agencies to move away from facial recognition. 

In addition to revisiting its recommendation guides, the GSA wants to rework its current websites to make sure that they still run well on older computer systems. The GSA has previously deployed facial recognition technology from Acuant in the Login.gov portal, and adopted BIO-key’s PortalGuard solution to enable two-factor authentication.

Source: TechCrunch

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April 25, 2022 – by Eric Weiss