We built an ‘unbelievable’ (but legal) facial recognition machine

New York Times:

To demonstrate how easy it is to track people without their knowledge, we collected public images of people who worked near Bryant Park (available on their employers’ websites, for the most part) and ran one day of footage through Amazon’s commercial facial recognition service. Our system detected 2,750 faces from a nine-hour period (not necessarily unique people, since a person could be captured in multiple frames). It returned several possible identifications, including one frame matched to a head shot of Richard Madonna, a professor at the SUNY College of Optometry, with an 89 percent similarity score. The total cost: about $60.

And:

if you’re an adult in America, there’s more than a 50 percent chance that you’re already in a law enforcement facial recognition database, according to researchers at Georgetown.

This is a riveting read.