One police detective bragged that photos “could be covertly taken with a telephoto lens” then input into Clearview AI’s database of more than three billion scraped images to immediately identify suspects.
Long-time Slashdot reader v3rgEz writes: For the past year, government transparency non-profits and Open the Government have been digging into how local police departments around the country use facial recognition. The New York Times reports on their latest discovery: That a Peter Thiel-backed startup Clearview has scraped Facebook, Venmo, and dozens of other social media sites to create a massive, unregulated tool for law enforcement to track where you were, who you were with, and more, all with just a photo.
Read the Clearview docs yourself and file a request in your town to see if your police department is using it.
The Times describes Clearview as “the secretive company that might end privacy as we know it,” with one of the company’s early investors telling the newspaper that because information technology keeps getting more powerful, he’s concluded that “there’s never going to be privacy.”
He also expresses his belief that technology can’t be banned, then acknowledges “Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot