Boston has joined cities such as San Francisco, Oakland, and Cambridge in passing an ordinance to ban government use of facial recognition technology. Boston City Councilor Michelle Wu commented: “Boston should not be using racially discriminatory technology and technology that threatens our basic rights.”
One of the lessons of the last few weeks of lies and insanity from the left is that America’s law enforcement community, which puts life and limb on the line every day to keep the country’s citizens safe, has few friends among the country’s political and media establishment — and even fewer in the Big Tech hubs of Silicon Valley and Seattle.
E-commerce giant Amazon has reportedly banned police agencies from using its facial recognition technology for one year in response to growing calls to sever ties with U.S. police departments.
Tech giant IBM will reportedly stop offering general-purpose facial recognition or analysis software and has called for a “national dialogue” on police reform according to a letter sent to Congress today by IBM CEO Arvind Krishna.
The Signal messaging app introduced a feature this week that will help protesters shield their identities. When activated, the feature uses facial detection technology to automatically blur faces in pictures, hindering law enforcement efforts to identify violent rioters and looters. According to the company, “One immediate thing seems clear: 2020 is a pretty good year to cover your face.”
Facial recognition firm Clearview AI, which has come under fire for scraping social media sites such as Facebook to create a facial recognition library, now reportedly plans to work with the government on Chinese virus contact tracing.
The source code of controversial facial recognition tech startup Clearview AI has reportedly been exposed due to a lapse in security measures.
A surveillance company based in Austin, Texas, claims they have created a camera system that can detect if a person has the Wuhan coronavirus. The camera reportedly uses thermal technology to detect fevers.
Facial recognition company Clearview AI, which works with hundreds of law enforcement agencies, has stated that the firm’s entire client list has been stolen, including how many users each client has, and how many searches they have completed using the service.
The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) is arguing for increased surveillance measures in the United Kingdom, including facial recognition, to combat crime and terrorism, however, critics fear the increased capabilities will negatively impact civil liberties. Dame Cressida Dick,
The University of California, Los Angeles, announced this week that they will not be moving forward with a plan to use facial recognition technology on campus. The decision comes ahead of a planned day of protests by students and advocacy groups that focus on privacy rights.
Social media giant Facebook has reportedly reached a $550 million settlement over a lawsuit that claimed the company illegally collected and stored biometric data for millions of users via facial recognition technology without their consent.
College students around the country have launched a campaign against the adoption of facial recognition technology on campus. A report revealed that the University of San Francisco deployed the technology in campus dorm rooms as early as 2013 to surveil students.
The New York Times published an investigation recently into a little-known startup that helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images using facial recognition, and the privacy issues that are raised by the company and its massive database of photos.
The Australian government is reportedly proposing the use of facial recognition technology to verify the age of those who seek to watch pornography online.
A recent article from the Nation outlines how tech firms such as Google harvest personal data from people without transparency or regulation.
Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), a private equity firm bankrolled by the Chinese government that is tied to Hunter Biden, invested in a company that has been blacklisted by the U.S. government.
A recent report alleges that Google targeted homeless people with “darker skin tones” to capture their biometric data to improve the tech giant’s facial unlock system.
Detroit Police Chief James Craig criticized Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s (D-MI) bizarre remarks about hiring only black analysts to review facial recognition software, noting the “double standard” and calling her assertion “racist.”
Far-left “Squad” member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) on Monday urged Detroit’s police chief to solely hire African-Americans as analysts to run their facial recognition program, claiming non-black people believe black people “all look the same,” according to the Detroit News.
Whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who revealed the mass surveillance of Americans in his 2013 leaks about the National Security Agency (NSA), has issued a warning about the rise of AI-driven policing in the near future.
Social media giant Facebook is now opening up its facial recognition technology to all users and will be discontinuing the “tag suggestions” feature on pictures, despite a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg’s company over intrusive use of facial recognition without user consent.
Chinese companies are giving shoppers the option to pay with a facial recognition system that asks them to do little more than smile into a camera to identify themselves.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) went toe to toe with the Detroit Police Department on Twitter Tuesday over the use of facial recognition technology.
According to a test by the ACLU, Amazon’s facial recognition system incorrectly identified one in five California lawmakers were incorrectly identified as criminals by the software.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of MIT, has joined a number of other cities in moving to ban the government and police from using facial recognition technology on its citizens.
The Orlando Police Department ended a pilot test of Amazon’s Rekognition facial scanning tech this week after failing to properly utilize the software due to multiple glitches and a lack of resources.
According to a recent report, approximately four out of five people identified by the London Metropolitan Police’s facial recognition system as possible suspects are totally innocent.
The University of Colorado, Colorado Springs is facing criticism over its decision to photograph students for use with facial recognition software without their consent.
San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted this week to outlaw facial recognition surveillance technology that they say could have been used by the city government to invade on the privacy of its citizens.
A New York teenager is suing tech giant Apple for $1 billion, claiming that the company’s facial recognition software led to him being falsely arrested.
Microsoft has reportedly refused to provide California law enforcement with access to its facial recognition technology for use in police body cameras and cars.
Facial recognition systems could result in identified shoplifters being banned from almost every store, according to a report.
NBC News notes in a recent article that the faces of millions of people are being used without their consent to program facial recognition software that could one day be used to spy on them.
Facial recognition software’s struggle to identify transgender and “nonbinary” people could have dangerous results in the future, according to a report from Vice’s Motherboard.
Amazon officials reportedly defended the company’s facial recognition programs during a meeting with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Thursday, just hours before Amazon reversed its controversial deal to base its new “HQ2” headquarters in New York City.
E-commerce giant Amazon has defended its facial recognition software from claims of racial and gender bias following a study by MIT.
Gov. Ralph Northam (D-VA) is reportedly considering using facial recognition software to prove he does not appear in a decades-old racist photo amid reports the embattled Virginia Democrat is backtracking on his apology and has no immediate plans to resign.
Facebook’s popular “10 Year Challenge” could potentially be a data mining ploy under the guise of a harmless Internet meme. The data could be used to train machines to better recognize age-progression characteristics, according to Wired magazine.
California Judge: Police Can’t Force You to Unlock Smartphone with Finger or Face
