  The automatic analysis of face images can generate predictions about a
person's gender, age, race, facial expression, body mass index, and various
other indices and conditions. A few recent publications have claimed success in
analyzing an image of a person's face in order to predict the person's status
as Criminal / Non-Criminal. Predicting criminality from face may initially seem
similar to other facial analytics, but we argue that attempts to create a
criminality-from-face algorithm are necessarily doomed to fail, that apparently
promising experimental results in recent publications are an illusion resulting
from inadequate experimental design, and that there is potentially a large
social cost to belief in the criminality from face illusion.
