![]() Clearview told the New York Times that, using the billions of photos it has scraped from millions of websites, it can find a match for an individual’s face up to 75% of the time. The releases also highlight multiple instances of police voluntarily using their access to the system to assist in identifying suspects for departments in other jurisdictions.Įarly Saturday, The New York Times released a report on Clearview and the materials found in our requests. In a release from the Clifton Police Department in New Jersey, emails show officers were attracted to the Clearview system in part for its ability to run searches on individuals in the field without informing them. The releases from Atlanta and Gainesville to MuckRock include emails, contracts, and legal briefings. We asked for contracts and agreements, communications about the technology, guiding policies, and invoices. ![]() Our requests asked for a few basic elements to help us learn more about where and how police departments are acquiring and using facial recognition. In one August 2019 record from Atlanta, an estimated 200 agencies were reported to use the Clearview system, and police officers are sharing their access with other agencies, according to documents received through a MuckRock request. In collaboration with Open The Government, MuckRock requested materials from the largest police departments in the country, including Atlanta, Georgia, which first released records on Clearview AI.Īs part of that project, Police Surveillance: Facial Recognition Use in Your Backyard, OTG’s Freddy Martinez then requested information about Clearview’s business in other locations, including Gainesville, Florida and Clifton, New Jersey. Can your online photo end up in a commercial database indefinitely? Could the Department of Motor Vehicles sell your driver’s license photo? Do police departments use this tech to find out where individuals have been and when? For now, the de-facto answer to questions like these is yes. Companies developing facial recognition tech are evolving more quickly than lawmakers can address basic issues or create consumer guards. But Clearview AI uses open source images, and their self-reported 3 billion-plus image inventory is many times larger than comparable collections and the largest set we’ve seen available.įacial recognition technology is the frontline of the fight between tools meant to promote public safety and Constitutional protections. The ACLU and academics have pointed out facial recognition is trained on and created by those with Caucasian-featured faces, reinforcing race-based biases in policing.įacial recognition databases can rely on mugshots or drivers licenses for faces or can be open-sourced from the streets and cyber highways of the United States. The system analyzes a face for particular measurements and ratios, and then based on that model, the image is compared to a database of known or existing faces. Typically, such facial recognition identification is based on numbers. The company claims to use “billions of publicly available photos, including news articles, social media accounts, and public mugshot databases,” which is used to find matches when an image needs to be identified. Technological capacity for collecting, storing, and analyzing images is growing, and Clearview is one of the private vendors accelerating the trend. It’s likely most Americans have never heard of Clearview AI, Inc., but many still have a good chance of being in the company’s massive facial recognition database.
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