Should facial recognition tech be used by police?

Facial recognition firm Clearview AI has run nearly 1 million individual searches at the request of US police departments across the country, company founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That told BBC News in an interview published late Monday.

Ton-That also revealed that Clearview AI’s dataface database now contains 30 billion images of people’s faces. That’s up from 20 billion images one year ago.

👥 Some quick background: Last May, Clearview AI was banned from selling its facial recognition services to any US companies after the ACLU successfully sued the firm for breaking consumer privacy laws.

But the ruling carved out an exemption for police, which have been using Clearview to run searches for several years now. And it’s not an insignificant amount of departments.

In a 2020 interview, Ton-That said around 2,400 federal, state, and local US law-enforcement agencies (out of ~18,000) were utilizing the firm’s facial recognition technology to help with criminal investigations.

• Miami’s assistant chief of police recently told BBC News that his department uses the facial recognition software ~450 times a year for every type of crime, from solving murders to clearing shoplifting suspects from suspicion.
• The department’s policy, he said, is to treat facial recognition searches like receiving a tip: “We don't make an arrest because an algorithm tells us to. We either put that name in a photographic line-up or we go about solving the case through traditional means."

✋ Yes, but… Some lawmakers and rights groups have cautioned against widespread use of the technology, warning of potential issues with accuracy and privacy.

Critics also focus on how intimate personal data (aka your face) is, for the most part, scraped from public platforms like Twitter and Instagram without users’ consent. And unlike passwords, phone numbers, or email addresses, this type of data can’t be easily altered after a potential hack.

• The tech also isn’t perfect; since 2019, at least four men – each of them Black – have been falsely arrested in the US due to facial recognition tech, which tends to misidentify people of color more often than white folks.

🇺🇸 Across the US: Since 2019, nearly two dozen state or local governments have passed laws restricting the use of facial recognition technology – though some areas later walked back those restrictions due to procedural reasons or a spike in violent crime.

📊 Flash poll: In your opinion, widespread use of facial recognition technology by police would be a _____ for society.

Good idea

Mostly good idea

Mostly bad idea

Bad idea

Change that has no effect

Unsure/other