Miami police use Clearview’s facial recognition in shoplifting investigations

Clearview AI has reached a milestone, with American police performing a million facial recognition searches to investigate crimes of varying levels of severity, the BBC reports.

The BBC reports that Miami Police told the outlet that it uses Clearview for all types of crime. Assistant Chief of Police Armando Aguilar tells the BBC that his force used Clearview about 450 times last year, including to solve several murders. It is also used in investigations of shoplifting and other crimes, according to the report.

The article refers to people being arrested for crimes they did not commit following false matches by facial recognition system, and quotes a defense lawyer who doubts the accuracy of facial recognition. Ton-That blames the arrests on poor policing practices.

CEO Hoan Ton-That told the BBC that hundreds of police forces across the country are using facial recognition from his company. He also says the company is up to 30 billion facial images in its database. France’s CNIL noted in October it was up to 20 billion.

Ton-That told Biometric Update last August that the company was up to 70 million images in its training dataset.

The technology is also being used in the Ukraine is not clear, and as in U.S. police investigation, the scope may be broader than the most commonly-mentioned use case.

An article in Wired makes the argument that the use of Clearview’s facial recognition by Ukraine’s government and military is shielded from moral scrutiny it deserves by the fog of war.

Facial recognition is being used to identify the deceased, but the article refers to indications that it is used to identify captured individuals as well.

Ukraine Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov was asked a year ago how Clearview’s facial recognition would be used by the government, and responded that “most of these use cases would not be public.”

A Clearview advisor said when the technology was first offered to Ukraine that it could be used to vet people at checkpoints.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  Clearview AI  |  criminal ID  |  face biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  police  |  U.S. Government