US Law Enforcement Uses AI to Bypass Facial Recognition Bans

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Veritone’s AI tool, Track, is used by federal, state, and local law enforcement to follow individuals based on non-biometric attributes. This circumvents facial recognition bans and raises significant privacy and civil liberties concerns, despite being promoted as compliant with privacy laws.[AI generated]

Why's our monitor labelling this an incident or hazard?

The article explicitly describes an AI system (Track) used by law enforcement to track individuals across video feeds by analyzing multiple physical attributes, effectively bypassing facial recognition restrictions. This use of AI directly affects individuals' privacy and civil liberties, which are fundamental human rights. The involvement of the AI system in enabling pervasive surveillance and tracking constitutes a violation of rights as defined in the framework. The article also notes criticism from the ACLU highlighting these concerns. Since the AI system's use is ongoing and has led to realized harms related to privacy and rights violations, this qualifies as an AI Incident rather than a hazard or complementary information.[AI generated]
AI principles
Privacy & data governanceRespect of human rightsTransparency & explainabilityAccountabilityDemocracy & human autonomy
Industries
Government, security, and defenceDigital security
Affected stakeholders
General public
Harm types
Human or fundamental rightsPublic interestPsychologicalReputational
Business function:
Compliance and justiceMonitoring and quality control
AI system task:
Recognition/object detection

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