Brian HoweyMembers of the Vallejo Police Department secretly used facial recognition technology developed by Clearview AI, a company embroiled in public controversy for allegedly violating personal privacy laws in several U.S. states and foreign countries, according to a search records database published in connection with a year-long investigation by BuzzFeed News.
The Vallejo Police Department was among more than 1,800 public entities across the country, many of them law enforcement agencies, whose employees used free trials of Clearview’s facial recognition service to run largely-unregulated searches on suspects and test subjects alike, BuzzFeed reported. Some agencies rejected Clearview AI’s software after just one search. Others never tried it at all, including in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, where local ordinances have prohibited government use of facial recognition technologies since 2019.
But Vallejo police used Clearview AI facial recognition software between 11 and 50 times between 2018 and February of last year, records show, raising unanswered questions about how the department used the service or any results it produced. Department spokesperson Brittany K. Jackson said in an initial April 7 statement that Vallejo police do not use Clearview AI and that command staff were unaware of any use in the three years covered by BuzzFeed’s report.
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