Controversial facial recognition tool designed for policing has been quietly deployed across the country with little to no public oversight. According to reporting and data reviewed by BuzzFeed News, more than 7,000 individuals from nearly 2,000 public agencies nationwide have used Clearview AI to search through millions of Americans’ faces, looking for people, including Black Lives Matter protesters, Capitol insurrectionists, petty criminals, and their own friends and family members.
BuzzFeed News has developed a searchable table of 1,803 publicly funded agencies whose employees are listed in the data as having used or tested the controversial policing tool before February 2020. These include local and state police, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Air Force, state healthcare organizations, offices of state attorneys general, and even public schools.
In many cases, leaders at these agencies were unaware that employees were using the tool; five said they would pause or ban its use in response to questions about it.
Controversial tech company Clearview AI says it’s in talks with federal and state agencies to track COVID-19 using facial recognition.
This technology is from China, the biggest and most advanced surveillance regime in the world. Privacy and civil liberties are what need to be protected and discussed. Not surprisingly they violated Facebook’s TOS by scraping every photo off every single user to build up their facial database. Don’t ever grant Clearview AI one shred of legitimacy. Burn them to the ground.
Clearview AI, which has alarmed privacy experts, hired several far-right employees, a HuffPost investigation found.
The notion that we already have CCTV so people won’t mind if we add facial recognition/other types of AI image analysis is deeply concerning.
Face recognition and other types of biometric analysis can turn passive video surveillance into something active and searchable across time and space. This massively increases the potential for abuse. It is terrifying that people developing these tools don’t see the difference.
An early-1980s SCOTUS case allowed for a proto-GPS radio tracking device has now provided the legal underpinning for automated license plate readers, which didn’t exist at the time.
The New York Times published an exposé about a shadowy facial recognition firm called Clearview AI in January, it seemed like the worst nightmare of privacy advocates had arrived.
Clearview is the most powerful form of facial recognition technology ever created, according to the Times. With more than 3 billion photos scraped surreptitiously from social media profiles and websites, its image database is almost seven times the size of the FBI’s. Its mobile app can match names to faces with a tap of a touchscreen. The technology is already being integrated into augmented reality glasses so people can identify almost anyone they look at.
Clearview has contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, BuzzFeed reported earlier this year, and FBI agents, members of Customs and Border Protection, and hundreds of police officers at departments nationwide are among its users.
CEO of Surveillance Firm Banjo Once Helped KKK Leader Shoot Up a Synagogue Documents reveal Damien Patton, CEO of SoftBank-backed Banjo, admitted to being a neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth
In grand jury testimony that ultimately led to the conviction of two of his associates, Patton revealed that, as a 17-year-old, he was involved with the Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
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