{"id":1206,"date":"2025-05-17T11:00:37","date_gmt":"2025-05-17T11:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/track-facial-recognition-ai-tool\/"},"modified":"2025-05-17T11:00:37","modified_gmt":"2025-05-17T11:00:37","slug":"track-facial-recognition-ai-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/track-facial-recognition-ai-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hot New AI Tool in Law Enforcement Is a Workaround for Places Where Facial Recognition Is Banned"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div><img width=\"1200\" height=\"630\" src=\"https:\/\/wordpress-assets.futurism.com\/2025\/05\/facerec.jpg\" class=\"attachment-full size-full wp-post-image\" alt=\"A new AI tool called Track is being used as a workaround to the current laws against facial recognition, not to improve the tech.\" style=\"margin-bottom: 15px;\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/div>\n<p>At the end of 2024, fifteen US states had laws banning some version of facial recognition.<\/p>\n<p>Usually, these laws were written on the basis that the technology is a nightmare-level privacy invasion that&#8217;s also too shoddy to be relied upon. Now, a new company aims to solve that problem \u2014 though maybe not in the way you&#8217;d imagine (or like).<\/p>\n<p>Per <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2025\/05\/12\/1116295\/how-a-new-type-of-ai-is-helping-police-skirt-facial-recognition-bans\/\">a report in <em>MIT Technology Review<\/em><\/a>, 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.banfacialrecognition.com\/map\/\">the places it&#8217;s allowed to operate<\/a>). It&#8217;s a classic tale of technology as &#8220;disruption,&#8221; simply by identifying a legal loophole to be exploited.<\/p>\n<p>That new tool, called Track, is a &#8220;nonbiometric&#8221; system that emerged out of a SkyNet-esque company that specializes in video analytics, Veritone.<\/p>\n<p>According to <em>MIT Technology Review<\/em>&#8216;s story, it already has 400 customers using Track in places where facial recognition is banned, or in instances where someone&#8217;s face is covered. Even more: Last summer, Veritone issued a press release announcing the US Attorney&#8217;s office had <a href=\"https:\/\/www.veritone.com\/newsroom\/press-releases\/doj-eousa\/\">expanded the remit<\/a> of their Authorization to Operate, the mandate that gives a company like Veritone the ability to carry out surveillance operations.<\/p>\n<p>Why? Because Track can (supposedly) triangulate people&#8217;s identities off of footage using a series of identifying factors, which include monitored subjects&#8217; shoes, clothing, body shape, gender, hair, and various accessories \u2014 basically, everything but your face. The footage Track is capable of scanning includes everything from closed-circuit security tapes, body-cams, drone footage, Ring cameras, and crowd\/public footage (sourced from various social media networks where it&#8217;s been uploaded).<\/p>\n<p>In a view <em>MIT Technology Review<\/em> obtained of Track in operation, users can select from a dropdown menu listing a series of attributes by which they want to identify subjects: Accessory, Body, Face, Footwear, Gender, Hair, Lower, Upper. Each of those menus has a sub-menu. On &#8220;Accessory,&#8221; the sub-menu lists: Any Bag, Backpack, Box, Briefcase, Glasses, Handbag, Hat, Scarf, Shoulder Bag, and so on. The &#8220;Upper&#8221; attribute breaks down into Color, Sleeve, Type (of upper-body clothing), and those types break down into more sub-categories.<\/p>\n<p>Once the user selects the attributes they&#8217;re looking for, Track gives the user a series of images taken from the footage being reviewed, containing a series of matches. And from there, it will continue to help users narrow down footage until they&#8217;ve assembled a triangulation of their surveillance target&#8217;s path.<\/p>\n<p>If this sounds like current facial recognition software \u2014 in other words, like it&#8217;s a relatively fallible Orwellian enterprise, bound to waste quite a bit of money, <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/the-byte\/facial-recognition-ai-false-arrest\">netting all the wrong people<\/a> along the way \u2014 well, the folks at Veritone see it another way.<\/p>\n<p>Their CEO called Track their &#8220;Jason Bourne tool,&#8221; while also praising its ability to <em>exonerate<\/em> those identified by it. It&#8217;s an incredibly dark, canny way to get around limitations on their ability to use facial recognition tracking systems, simply by providing something very much like it, that isn&#8217;t precisely biometric data. By going around that loophole, Signal equips police departments and federal law enforcement agencies with the unencumbered opportunity to conduct surveillance that&#8217;s been legislated against in all but the precise letter of the law. And surveillance, it&#8217;s worth noting, that might be even more harmful or detrimental than facial recognition itself.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s entirely possible that people who wear certain kinds of clothing or look a certain way can be caught up by Track. And this is in a world where we already know people have been falsely <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/the-byte\/rite-aid-facial-recognition-shoppers\">accused of theft<\/a>, falsely <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/the-byte\/facial-recognition-ai-false-arrest\">arrested<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/the-byte\/sunglass-hut-facial-recognition-falsely-jailed\">falsely jailed<\/a>, all thanks to facial recognition technology.<\/p>\n<p>Or as American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Nathan Wessler told <em>MIT Tech Review<\/em>: &#8220;It creates a categorically new scale and nature of privacy invasion and potential for abuse that was literally not possible any time before in human history.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Looks like they&#8217;re gonna have to find another name for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.banfacialrecognition.com\/map\/\">the big map<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>More on Facial Recognition: <\/strong><em><a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/facial-recognition-meta-plan\">Years After Promising to Stop Facial Recognition Work, Meta Has a Devious New Plan<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/track-facial-recognition-ai-tool\">The Hot New AI Tool in Law Enforcement Is a Workaround for Places Where Facial Recognition Is Banned<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/\">Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[316,177,314,644,645],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai","category-artificial-intelligence","category-facial-recognition","category-surviellance","category-veritone"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}