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Blake, Wm. Milton a Poem. 1804.

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Police in California used DNA to predict a suspect’s face and then tried to run facial recognition on it—the first known instance of this happening, and likely not the last.

In 2017, the East Bay Regional Park District Police Department revisited the 1990 murder of Maria Jane Weidhofer, utilizing new DNA technology to generate a suspect's facial image. They received help from the company Parabon NanoLabs, which created a 3D rendering of the suspect based on DNA evidence. The report depicted a male with fair skin, brown eyes and hair, no freckles, and bushy eyebrows.

The department then released the generated image to the public, a decision deemed controversial. In 2020, a detective requested to run the image through facial recognition software, despite it being against Parabon NanoLabs' terms of service.

“Using DNA found at the crime scene, Parabon Labs reconstructed a possible suspect’s facial features,” the detective explained in a request for “analytical support” sent to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. “I have a photo of the possible suspect and would like to use facial recognition technology to identify a suspect/lead.”

The detective’s request has just been unveiled, found in a trove of hacked police records published by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets.

Jennifer Lynch, general counsel at civil liberties nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation: “It’s really just junk science to consider something like this. There’s no real evidence that Parabon can accurately produce a face in the first place. It’s very dangerous because it puts people at risk of being a suspect for a crime they didn’t commit.”