![]() Clearview itself has said it “exists to help law enforcement agencies solve the toughest cases.” But recent reporting shows just how quickly that argument slides down its slippery slope. Law enforcement agencies often argue they must have access to new technology-no matter how privacy invasive-to help them solve the most heinous of crimes. And even Clearview itself seems to have used its technology to monitor a journalist working on a story about its product. NYPD officers appear to have been using Clearview on their personal devices without department approval and after the agency’s official face recognition unit rejected the technology. Agencies in Florida have used face recognition thousands of times to try to identify unknown suspects without ever informing those suspects or their defense attorneys about the practice. During the protests surrounding the death of Freddie Gray in 2015, Baltimore Police ran social media photos against a face recognition database to identify protesters and arrest them. Police in the UK continue to use real-time face recognition to identify people they’ve added to questionable “watchlists,” despite high error rates, serious flaws, and significant public outcry. Law enforcement has already used “live” face recognition on public streets and at political protests. Police abuse of facial recognition technology is not theoretical: it’s happening today. Law Enforcement Abuse of Face Recognition Technology Impacts Communities Without a moratorium or a ban, law enforcement agencies will continue to exploit technologies like Clearview’s and hide their use from the public. Even the New Jersey Attorney General was surprised to learn-after reading the New York Times article that broke the story-that officers in his own state were using the technology, and that Clearview was using his image to sell its services to other agencies.Īll of this shows, yet again, why we need to press pause on law enforcement use of face recognition. ![]() But up until last week, most of the general public had never even heard of the company. ![]() ![]() Clearview’s technology doesn’t appear to be limited to static photos but can also scan for faces in videos on social media sites.Ĭlearview has been actively marketing its face recognition technology to law enforcement, and it claims more than 1,000 agencies around the country have used its services. Clearview claims to have amassed a dataset of over three billion face images by scraping millions of websites, including news sites and sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Venmo. This could allow the police to learn that person’s identity along with significant and highly personal information. These stories discuss some of the police departments around the country that have been secretly using Clearview’s technology, and they show, yet again, why we need strict federal, state, and local laws that ban-or at least press pause-on law enforcement use of face recognition.Ĭlearview’s service allows law enforcement officers to upload a photo of an unidentified person to its database and see publicly-posted photos of that person along with links to where those photos were posted on the internet. This week, additional stories came out about Clearview AI, the company we wrote about earlier that’s marketing a powerful facial recognition tool to law enforcement.
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