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. #trending #featured

The event was meant to be livestreamed, but there was strong demand from companies to test the bot

Chinese search engine Baidu has shared pre-recorded videos of its A.I.-powered chatbot Ernie.

Revealing the bot performing more advanced tasks than at its launch two weeks ago.

While the videos were shown during a closed-door meeting, images shared by a Baidu spokesperson appeared to show significant developments.

This included summarising financial statements and producing powerpoint presentations, as well as producing travel itineraries.

The videos were shown to the first batch of companies that are testing an industry-focused version of the chatbot.

Ernie is considered China’s closest equivalent to U.S.-developed ChatGPT.

The meeting was originally meant to be a livestreamed product launch open to the media and public.

But the format was changed to prioritise what Baidu said was the “strong demand” from over 120,000 companies that had applied to test the bot.

More companies will be able to sign up to test the industry-focused version of the Ernie bot starting on March 31.

Tests conducted show that the regular version has a good command of the Chinese language.

However, it produces factual errors and avoids answering political questions.

Germany has joined Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States to stop the tech company

China has blasted Germany over the nation’s reported plan to ban Huawei from the country’s 5G network.

In Berlin, the Chinese embassy said it is “very puzzled” and “strongly dissatisfied” by the move.

Diplomats believe the decision has been made by Germany’s government without any factual basis.

Adding, the move violates German economic laws and the principles of fair competition.

The reported ban follows similar moves made by Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Hugh Odom from Vertical Consultants gave us the details.