Revealing the app to help strangers find anyone’s information just from a photo, so bad that even the FBI has to use it

Technology only appears in Hollywood movies that have appeared in real life when startup startup Clearview AI (based in New York, USA) has discovered an application that integrates artificial intelligence, which is capable of The ability to look up names, addresses and other personal information based on a single photo.

The toolkit works so well that it is being used by more than 600 police departments in states like Florida, Georgia, and New Jersey over the past year. Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Department of Homeland Security are planning to test this application in the near future.

Turn over the Internet to find personal information

According to the New York Times, Clearview AI works by ‘digging’ into data shared on the Internet to get information related to an object to be searched.

Initially, the app collated images taken by the object in search of identity with a huge data warehouse of 3 billion photos, which Clearview AI collected from a variety of social networks such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter..vv Next, Clearview AI’s algorithm will filter images with characteristics that match the identity of the object in search, while continuing to exploit more information related to the object. Social networks and related websites.

Finally, Clearview AI will summarize all the information found, sketching so ‘portrait’ in the most detail of the object to look for, including name, image, address of residence, occupation, you. friends and relatives and a series of other personal information was “excavated”.

Notably, Clearview AI’s image database is also rated by experts as the most complete and detailed in the world today. It is even superior in size to the database of the authorities of the US government. For example, the FBI database, which is considered to be one of the largest databases today, stores 641 million images of US citizens, still significantly inferior in terms of the number of images. collected compared to ClearView AI.

Currently, the Clearview AI app is only used by law enforcement agencies in the United States to identify the culprit and victim, thereby helping to solve cases from theft, child sexual assault to murder. people. Thanks to Clearview AI, Indiana state police only takes 20 minutes to handle a shootings. The suspect didn’t have a driver’s license, so he didn’t have information in the government database, but he happened to appear in a video posted on social media.

According to The New York Times, this app will be widely commercialized in the future, when users can spend a fee to exploit Clearview AI database.

However, there has been a lot of concern that Clearview AI’s tools could be used to spy on others or be used for mass surveillance – a serious breach of other people’s privacy. Worth mentioning, regulations on face recognition technology are currently not uniform in the US. Some cities like San Francisco have banned the use of facial recognition technology for fear of privacy breaches. However, these are only laws that are enforced in certain states or cities, while no federal law on privacy security has been introduced.

In addition, privacy advocates also issued warnings of false identities leading to ‘unjust convictions’, when facial recognition algorithms were less accurate.

Consult the New York Times