Clearview AI is a facial recognition tool that uses billions of photos taken from the public web, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Clearview AI founder Hoan Ton-That said officials affiliated with the state agencies where the information was analyzed in the case, known as fusion centers, were not using his company’s application at the time.
According to the police report, the correspondence in this case was with a license photo, which would reside in a government database, to which Clearview AI does not have access. The police involved in the correspondence – the New York State Intelligence Center, the Regional Operations Intelligence Center in New Jersey and two state investigators – did not answer questions about which facial recognition system was used.
In January, after a New York Times article on Clearview AI, New Jersey’s attorney general, Gurbir S. Grewal, put a moratorium on police use of Clearview and announced an investigation into “this product or similar products”. A spokesman for the attorney general’s office said the New Jersey Criminal Justice Division was still evaluating the use of facial recognition products in the state and that the development of a policy governing their use was underway.
‘I was afraid’
After his arrest, Mr. Parks was detained for 10 days at Middlesex County Prison Center. The New Jersey bondless system uses an algorithm that assesses the defendant’s risk rather than money to determine whether a defendant can be released before the trial.
A decade ago, Mr. Parks was arrested twice and jailed for selling drugs. He was released in 2016. The score on the public safety assessment he received, which would have taken into account his previous convictions, was high enough that he was not released after his first hearing. His mother and fiancee hired a lawyer, who managed to get him out of prison and put him on a pre-trial monitoring program.
His history with the criminal justice system is what made this incident so frightening, he said, because it would have been his third crime, meaning he was in danger of a long sentence. When the prosecutor offered a court settlement, he almost accepted it, although he was innocent.
“I sat down with my family and discussed it,” Parks said. “I was afraid to go to trial. I knew I would take 10 years if I lost. “