iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

A district in New York has adopted the technology in the name of safety. Opponents cite privacy and bias concerns.

As innocuous as it may seem, the viral “10 Year Challenge” flooding social media feeds everywhere may have been created to collect large amounts of data for future facial recognition software, according to one prominent tech writer.

""Jmmy Gomez is a California Democrat, a Harvard graduate and one of the few Hispanic lawmakers serving in the US House of Representatives. But to Amazon's facial recognition system, he looks like a potential criminal.

Gomez was one of 28 US Congress members falsely matched with mugshots of people who've been arrested, as part of a test the American Civil Liberties Union ran last year of the Amazon Rekognition program.  Nearly 40 percent of the false matches by Amazon's tool, which is being used by police, involved people of color.

The findings reinforce a growing concern among civil liberties groups, lawmakers and even some tech firms that facial recognitioncould harm minorities as the technology becomes more mainstream. A form of the tech is already being used on iPhones and Android phones, and police, retailers, airports and schools are slowly coming around to it too. But studies have shown that facial recognition systems have a harder time identifying women and darker-skinnedpeople, which could lead to disastrous false positives."

China is taking its obsession with facial recognition software to a next level by installing cameras in primary schools to monitor children’s attentiveness. Government-run Chinese website Hangzhou reported that a school has installed the cameras above a blackboard in a classroom that will monitor the kids in class.