Facial recognition used by US police | | | | Turtles AI

  Facial recognition firm Clearview conducted almost a million searches for US police and amassed 30 billion images without user permission, says CEO. Clearview, a facial recognition firm, has carried out almost a million searches for the US police, according to the company's CEO, Hoan Ton-That. In a BBC interview, Ton-That also disclosed that Clearview had accumulated 30 billion images, which it had scraped from social media sites such as Facebook without user permission. The company has been fined repeatedly in Europe and Australia for privacy violations. Critics claim that the company's use by the police means that everyone is put into a "perpetual police line-up". Although banned from selling its services to most US companies, police are an exception, with hundreds of forces across the US using the software. However, Clearview is prohibited in several US cities, including San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. Although sold to the public as a tool for solving serious crimes, Miami police admitted using the software for every type of offence, yet they use it as a sort of a "tip" (and do not make an arrest just based on its suggestions). There have been some documented cases of mistaken identity arising from facial recognition, although the true extent of the problem is unclear due to a lack of transparency surrounding police use. Campaigners are calling for more testing of Clearview's algorithm, to be conducted by independent experts.