Fuss over facial recognition software

According to Tamedia reports the Zurich city police investigated how the controversial facial recognition software "Clearview" came to be used within its own ranks. The use of facial recognition technology is currently banned in Switzerland. The tool is also controversial, as the company stores billions of images in its databases, which are collected indiscriminately from social media. According to the American site Buzzfeed News officers of the Zurich city police and the St. Gallen cantonal police would have made between 50 searches with Clearview AI in February 2020.

City police email address appeared in database

In the internal documents available to the portal, e-mail addresses of the Zurich city police and the St. Gallen cantonal police were also visible from 88 nations. However, Stapo Zurich and Kapo St. Gallen deny that the software was used for tracing purposes. It has now emerged that an officer of the Zurich city police tested the software after his training.

Accordingly, the tool was recommended to the attendees to try out. The employee tested the software one day after the training with freely available images from the Internet. In total, he had tried the tool twelve times and had to provide his official business email address for registration. However, the city police maintain that the software was not used for law enforcement purposes, and no facial application was ever evaluated or procured.

Source: Der Bund/Tamedia-Newsnet