Police are reportedly using a new facial recognition app from Clearview AI, according to the New York Times. The database from the company reportedly has billions of images that were taken from websites like Venmo, YouTube, and Facebook.
Clearview’s system, which has over three billion images in its database, may reportedly have violated websites' terms of service. It was noted that police and law enforcement agencies can upload photos of people of interest in their cases, and in return draw back results of where the images are hosted at as well as social media profiles.
According to the New York Times, the app has reportedly helped police solve crimes like credit card fraud, shoplifting, murder, and more. This is an issue though, because of the possibility of false positives, which can get the wrong people arrested for things they didn’t do. In the past, we’ve seen people get arrested due to facial recognition software that falsely identified them as suspects of a crime.
source: NYT
