How a new type of AI is helping police skirt facial recognition bans

“If we are not allowed to track the faces of people, how do we help try to identify criminals or malicious behavior?” Says Ryan Stelberg, CEO of Veritone. In addition to tracking individuals where the face is not allowed to recognize the face legally, Stelberg says, it allows tracking when faces are blocked or invisible.

The producer has caused criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union, which – after learning the tool through Massachusetts Institute Technology Review Technology– It was primarily to see a non -permeter tracking system used widely in the United States. They have warned that it raises many concerns related to the same privacy, such as recognition of the face, but it also offers new companies at a time when the Trump administration pushes federal agencies to increase the monitoring of demonstrators, immigrants and students.

Veritone gave us an offer to the path in which he analyzed people in footage of different environments, starting with riots in January 6 to metro stations. You can use it to find people by determining the size of the body, sex, hair color, style, shoes, clothes and different accessories. The tool can then collect time tables, track a person through different sites and video extracts. It can be accessed through Amazon and Microsoft Cloud platforms.

In an interview, Stelburg said the number of uses of features to determine people will continue to grow. When asked if the track distinguishes on the basis of skin color, a company spokesman said it is one of the features that the algorithm uses to rid people of each other but the program does not allow users currently to search for people through skin color. TRACK only currently runs on recorded video, but Steelberg claims that the company is less than a year that it can play it on live video extracts.

Agencies that use the path can add clips of police body cameras, drones, or general videos on YouTube, or the so -called citizen download clips (from episode cameras or mobile phones, for example) in response to police requests.

“We would like to call this our Jason Bourne application,” says Stelberg. He expects technology to be scrutinized in court cases, but he says: “I hope to highlight people as much as we help the police find the bad guys.” The public sector currently represents only 6 % of Veritone (most of its customers are media and entertainment companies), but the company says that this is the fastest growth market, with customers in places including California, Washington, Colorado, New Jersey and Ilinoy.

This rapid expansion began to cause a warning in some circles. Jay Stanley, chief policy analyst in the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in 2019 that artificial intelligence would one day accelerate the arduous task of combing monitoring footage, allowing automatic analysis regardless of whether a crime had occurred. Since then, many police companies have been building video analyzes that can, for example, discover when a person enters a specific area. However, Stanley says, the path is the first product that he watched is widely tracked for certain technologically possible people.