By Katherine Tangalakis-LippertÂ
- Clearview AI scraped 30 billion photos from social media to build its facial recognition database.
- US police have used the database nearly a million times, the company’s CEO told the BBC.
- One digital rights advocate told Insider the company is “a total affront to peoples’ rights, full stop.”
A controversial facial recognition database, used by police departments across the nation, was built in part with 30 billion photos the company scraped from Facebook and other social media users without their permission, the company’s CEO recently admitted, creating what critics called a “perpetual police line-up,” even for people who haven’t done anything wrong.
The company, Clearview AI, boasts of its potential for identifying rioters at the January 6 attack on the Capitol, saving children being abused or exploited, and helping exonerate people wrongfully accused of crimes. But critics point to privacy violations and wrongful arrests fueled by faulty identifications made by facial recognition, including cases in Detroit and New Orleans, as cause for concern over the technology.
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (businessinsider.com)