What used to be a little-known company has since come to the forefront of headlines, as Clearview’s facial recognition application was used to identify protestors during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and suspects of the January 6 Capitol Insurrection. Īs much as our face is our own, it is also a piece of data waiting to be harvested, which is exactly what Clearview AI is doing-harvesting billions of our personal photos without our consent from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to create an application that allows law enforcement to identify a face within seconds. “Instead of the system being used for the benefit of the city,” he said, “it is being used as a tool of total surveillance and total control of citizens.” Civil rights advocates worry that “preading fear and deterring activism may be just the point” of Moscow’s new facial recognition system. Although his charges were eventually dropped, spending a month in prison was enough to deter him from participating in the next year’s protest. A week later, nine police officers barged through his apartment door and arrested him for “rioting and mass disorder.” He was identified by one of Moscow’s 189,000 surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities. In the summer of 2019, Sergei Abanichev threw an empty paper cup at a protest in Moscow. Ton-That said wrongful arrests are the result of "poor policing.Clearview AI’s First Amendment: A Dangerous Reality? For instance, in the recent wrongful arrest of Randal Reid, a Black man who was falsely accused of stealing in a state he had never visited, it’s unclear if police obtained the false match that led to the arrest using Clearview AI or MorphoTrak, a competing facial recognition system. Verifying that claim is difficult due to a lack of data and transparency around the use of facial recognition technology. Ton-That told BBC News he was not aware of any cases where Clearview mistakenly identified someone. "We either put that name in a photographic line-up or we go about solving the case through traditional means." “We don’t make an arrest because an algorithm tells us to,” he told BBC News. Assistant Chief of Police Armando Aguilar said the force has used the technology about 450 times per year. In a rare admission, the Miami Police Department revealed it uses Clearview AI to investigate all manner of crimes, including everything from theft to murder. While Engadget cannot confirm those figures, they suggest the company, despite recent setbacks at the hands of groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and legal threats from platform holders, has found no shortage of interest for its services. Last March, Clearview disclosed its database featured more than 20 billion “publicly available” images, meaning the platform has grown by a staggering 50 percent over the past year. CEO Hoan Ton-That shared the statistic in a recent interview with BBC News (via Gizmodo) where he also said the company had run nearly 1 million searches for US police. Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition software used by at least 3,100 law enforcement agencies across the US, has scrapped more than 30 billion images from social media platforms like Facebook.
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