STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. New York police had a problem with facial recognition software. Security camera images of a beer thief were too blurry to identify, so police replaced the blurry face with an image of the actor Woody Harrelson. The software found a match. Police made an arrest. Georgetown University's Center on Privacy and Technology called out this episode. Police insist facial recognition is just a tool. Nobody is arrested solely for resembling Woody Harrelson.
The suspect resembled a long-haired Woody Harrelson. To find the suspect, police enlisted photo recognition — they used a photo of Harrelson with long hair from the Hunger Games.