“THE LOS ANGELES Police Department (LAPD) banned the use of commercial facial recognition apps in November after BuzzFeedNews reported that more than 25 LAPD employees had performed nearly 475 searches using controversial technology developed by the company Clearview Al.” Such incident, another growing public concern relating to police surveillance using facial recognition.

Clearview AI’s App depends on billions of photos scraped from Facebook and other social media platforms. Like other facial recognition technologies, the app pairs the photos database with machine learning software to teach an algorithm how to match a face to the photos the company has collected.

Clearview is one example of a player in an expanding market. In December last year, The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office had coordinated 1,000 searches through its Cognitec facial recognition software since 2018.

Due to the concerns of such technologies, several legislative bodies had to delay, restrict, or halt the usage of such technologies use by law enforcement agencies.  “In December, the Massachusetts legislature approved the first state ban on police use of facial recognition tech. During nationwide protests over police abuse last summer, the New York City Council passed the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act, which requires the New York Police Department to disclose all of the surveillance technology it uses on the public.”