Controversial facial recognition has been used a million times by police to help track criminals
As facial recognition becomes more prominent, the founder of tech firm Clearview says his company has run nearly a million searches for U.S. police.
It’s also been revealed the company has scraped 30 billion images from platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, taken without users’ permissions.
The company has been fined numerous times in Europe and countries like Australia for breaches of privacy laws.
In the U.S., critics say the use of Clearview by authorities puts everyone into a “police line-up”.
The company’s high-tech system allows law enforcement to upload a photo of a face and find matches in a database comprising of billions of images it has collected.
It then provides links to where matching images appear online.
The tool is considered to be one of the world’s most powerful and accurate.
While the company is banned from selling its services to most U.S. companies, there is an exemption for police.
