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jimnyc
04-09-2021, 07:35 PM
I've read about this software quite a few times now. You can supposedly only get your hands on it if you work with law enforcement, but hell, they are the ones abusing it, or at least some.

They can get our photos from the DMV in each state - I think it's wrong of them to scrape such sites to take personal photos, but it's in the public domain.

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Cops Are Using Facial Recognition Technology More Than Previously Revealed

The surveillance state is available as a plug-and-play solution for any cop interested in a free trial period.

Clearview AI carved out a market niche for itself as a provider of facial recognition tools for law enforcement agencies that find the technology challenging to implement on their own. The company's plug-and-play surveillance capability entices government users with free trial periods and a database of billions of faces scraped without permission from social media. According to a new report, the technology has been used by more agencies than previously disclosed, sometimes without authorization. The report may not be complete, since many police departments belong to networks for sharing resources.

"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," the publication noted this week. The data was leaked to Buzzfeed by a source whose identity is being kept secret.

Uses to which the tool was put included searches for protesters, criminals—and friends and family members. Inappropriate searches on acquaintances could have been predicted by anybody aware of the abuse of official databases for curiosity and personal gain. "Police officers across the country misuse confidential law enforcement databases to get information on romantic partners, business associates, neighbors, journalists and others for reasons that have nothing to do with daily police work," the AP reported in 2016. A massive facial recognition database is an enormous temptation for unscrupulous government employees already accustomed to misusing such tools.

Aware of such problems, Clearview AI rolled out features last fall designed to make searches more easily auditable to cut down on misuse. But implementation of the controls requires internal monitoring by law enforcement heads. That's dependent on policy and on leaders actually knowing that officers are using the technology.

Rest - https://reason.com/2021/04/09/cops-are-using-facial-recognition-technology-more-than-previously-revealed/