The Hot New AI Tool in Law Enforcement Is a Workaround for Places Where Facial Recognition Is Banned

At the end of 2024, fifteen US states had laws banning some version of facial recognition. Usually, these laws were written on the basis that the technology is a nightmare-level privacy invasion that's also too shoddy to be relied upon. Now, a new company aims to solve that problem — though maybe not in the way you'd imagine (or like). Per a report in MIT Technology Review, a new AI tool called Track is being used not to improve facial recognition technology, nor as a way to make it less invasive of your personal civil liberties, but as a workaround to the current laws against facial recognition (which are few and far between, at least when compared to the places it's allowed to operate). It's a classic tale of technology as "disruption," simply by identifying a legal loophole to be exploited. That new tool, called Track, is a "nonbiometric" system that emerged out of a SkyNet-esque company that specializes in video analytics, Veritone. According to MIT Technology Review's story, i ... Read full article.