The Vadodara City Police, in the Indian state of Gujarat, is planning to use Clearview AI's controversial facial recognition software in public places such as railway stations and bus depots, and to track “property offenders”, Joint Commissioner of Vadodara City Police, KG Bhati, told MediaNama. The department had “piloted” the software “earlier this year”, Bhati said, but did not specify when, for how long, and for what purpose, or when they would start using the service. Another high-ranking official from the police department told MediaNama, on the condition of anonymity, that the software could be used in CCTVs installed at "specific locations" in the city. “We are planning to use the facial recognition software at public places, so that as soon as any offender passes through it, it would flash a message,” Bhati told us. He said that the plan to use the service is currently under process, but the "police department is very much planning to use it". Clearview AI's software is similar to those being used by other police departments in India; once you feed a person's image into it, it will pull out all matching faces from its database. The software pulls facial data from all publicly available images online, including from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram, YouTube, news articles, and more. The result is a database of unprecedented scale — over 3 billion images to be exact — to readily identify any person walking on the street, with just a single image. US law enforcement and police…
