New Jersey Bans Police From Using Clearview Facial Recognition App

The Jersey Shore reality TV show wasn’t the only great thing to come out of the Garden State…

Facial recognition technology has always been a controversial issue. Facial recognition technology uses a database of photos, such as mugshots and driver's license photos to identify people in security photos and videos. The technology uses biometrics to map facial features and help verify identity through key features of the face. Facial recognition technology has always been controversial, partly because it makes people nervous about Big Brother and has a tendency to deliver false matches for certain groups, like people of color.

The New York Times reported that Cleaview, a software start up, created a database of more than three billion photos from a variety of websites such as Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter and Venmo. The application goes above and beyond anything built by the U.S. government or Silicon Valley giants and is selling its tool to law enforcement agencies across the U.S. Without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list.

One of the start-up’s early investors David Scalzo was quoted as saying, “I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy. Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”

New Jersey the only state currently, to ban police officers from using Clearview, which has a 99% match rate. Gurbir S. Grewal, New Jersey’s attorney general said in an interview, “I was troubled. The reporting raised questions about data privacy, about cybersecurity, about law enforcement security, about the integrity of our investigations.”