Mountain View Police Department
Summary
| Has Banned Facial Recognition? | Currently Uses of Facial Recognition? | Previously Used Facial Recognition? | Coalition Representative? Volunteer Now |
Take Action! |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No | Limited Use * Investigation ongoing |
Has tested it | No | Sign the petition |
Details
Work in progress
This section is still a work in progress as we continue to investigate documents. Please check back in the coming days.Through public records requests, it was revealed that the Mountain View Police Department conducted a trial run of facial recognition software created by the extremely controversial tech start up Clearview AI. The New York City company first came into the public eye in January 2020 when tech and privacy journalist Kashmir Hill published a expose in the New York Times entitled The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It revealing that Clearview hosts a database of over three billion images, by far the largest of its kind, scraped from “millions” of sites. Further, the company claimed the software was gaining popularity with many law enforcement agencies, despite the founder’s own laments that the product doesn’t always work because the images police provide the app and the photos from the database are usually from very different angles.
Two days after Hill’s story was published, January 20, 2020, Mountain View PD Lt. Frank St.Clair emailed Kelly Knauer, a department crime analyst, asking “Do we have any wins from this yet?” He was referring to their trial of Clearview AI. Knauer indicated that they were able to positively identify a suspect that was peddling child pornography. She also indicated that she “had success with several returned warrants using booking photos” and that she was “able to find several individuals who had previously moved and we were able to send updated warrant letters to their addresses” using Clearview.
Shortly after the Times article was published, Buzzfeed News published an article not only exposing Clearview AI’s sales claims as unverifiable, but also that Hoan Ton-That, Clearview’s CEO, and his co-founder Richard Schwartz had ties to white nationalists and the far right. Who knows if it was that fact or one of the others that has since been revealed about Clearview and its origins since early this year that soured MVPD to the company. Despite the analyst’s early excitement and enthusiasm for the application and its use cases, Knauer informed Clearview they would not be moving forward with purchasing the solution in a May 2020 email. Whatever the reason be, MVPD made the right decision.
Take action!
If you are a resident of Mountain View, consider telling your city council to ban the use of facial recognition surveillance by signing this petition.Documents
The requests and responses can be seen below in reverse chronological order, followed by the documents attached to the responses.