General Intelligence
The Facial Recognition Backlash Is Here
But will the current bans last?
OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.
The facial recognition industry has been quietly working alongside law enforcement, military organizations, and private companies for years, leveraging 40-year old partnerships originally centered around fingerprint databases.
But in 2020, the industry faced an unexpected reckoning.
February brought an explosive New York Times report on Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that had scraped billions of images from social media to create an all-encompassing database, and quietly gave it to thousands of police departments and companies across the world.
A ubiquitous facial recognition database weaponizing public social media profiles to create tools for law enforcement and private security was a splash of cold water for those who hadn’t yet understood what the facial recognition industry had become. Now the technology has never been easier to implement by corporations and law enforcement, and the ramifications of the technology have never been more serious.
