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Police declined to be interviewed and did not address the record of Coster’s comments.
“Police briefly held Clearview AI earlier this year to assess whether it offered any value to police investigations,” Detective Superintendent Tom Fitzgerald, national manager of criminal investigations, said in a statement.
“This was a very limited trial to assess the value of the investigation. The trial has ended and the value of the investigations has been assessed as very limited and the technology at this stage will not be used by the New Zealand police.”
Before Fitzgerald’s statement, police spokespersons told RNZ on two separate occasions last week, on May 7 and 11, that the trial was still ongoing. A spokesman later said these statements were incorrect.
Clearview Al, whose first financial backers include New Zealand citizen Peter Thiel, has built a database of approximately 2.8 billion faces by lifting user images from social networking sites like Facebook, a practice that violates most the terms of service of these companies.
The software has not been independently tested, but in a “precision test result” that the company sent to the New Zealand Police, the report concluded that the software was 100 percent accurate in a facial recognition test. of all members of the United States Congress.
“Clearview can be used to combat terrorism to quickly and accurately identify suspects and conduct investigations using public information,” employee Marko Jukic told police in an email on January 31. The company reportedly fired Jukic after it emerged that he published controversial opinions online.
Police did not say what they used Clearview AI for at the trial, or who had access to it. Clearview, which has been used in the United States to solve everything from mailbox thefts to child sexual abuse cases, did not respond to questions about its relationship with the New Zealand police.
A law professor at Victoria University of Wellington, Marcin Betkier, said New Zealand’s privacy laws did not offer legal protections to the people whose data was used by Clearview.
“The data may be used against us, either by the police or perhaps by some other third party,” he said.
Edwards said facial recognition technology was unavoidable in New Zealand, but that there were ways to reduce its risks, including by reviewing the technology before trying it out.
“I was kind of surprised by this one,” he said.
RNZ
