[LatteLazy]

Is it that different to wanted posters or publishing cctv of a crime? I get why people don't want facial recognition cameras on every street corner but using it to identify people from pics is a different activity...

Edit: I completely agree there is nothing special about this case. No exigent circumstances.

[Barrin92]

I'm more concerned with the data being in the hand of an unaccountable private company than with the facial recognition itself to be honest. I remember that Clearview AI itself was associated with far-right individuals last year, so having them police a far-right insurrection from their personal black box system is more than suspect.

If it happens, it should be done by an institution that is under the supervision of congress and staffed by public servants. This emerging, largely unaccountable surveillance industrial complex with ties to extremist political figures worries me more.

[VBprogrammer]

Personally, I'm not really comfortable with the existence of a database of people from which to compare faces against.

However, I think it's perhaps more worrying that one day this evidence will be presented in court and the jury will trust the accuracy of "AI" over their own judgment.

To clarify, the situation I'm thinking of is where a grainy CCTV image is shown to the jury. The AI expert comes in and talks about all of the technical details of their algorithm and how it determines that the grainy image is of defendant A with 96% probably.

[colejohnson66]

Juries already have a tendency to believe the police even when presented with massive evidence to the contrary. Throw in some “expert” testimony from an AI company and we’re in for an even worse situation.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Is it that different to wanted posters or publishing cctv of a crime?

I think so. That mechanism is judicially auditable. The AI is not. We should not be arresting people based on the output of an unauditable mechanism.

[dragonwriter]

> That mechanism is judicially auditable. The AI is not. We should not be arresting people based on the output of an unauditable mechanism.

Are we, though? If “ClearView AI gave us a hit” is being treated as probable cause sufficient for an arrest warrant, that's a problem.

If it's being used as a tool to generate leads to investigate and traditional evidence is gathered and presented, I don't see a big problem.

[colejohnson66]

Police have demonstrated multiple times that “a hit” is enough for them to railroad an innocent person

[ianai]

It’s not auditable and scale can make it a substantially different problem altogether. But, if you’re in a restricted area or a public building I think it makes sense.