For over the past three months, a small encrypted group chat of Latin American authorities investigating cases of online child exploitation has been lighting up with reports of raids, arrests and rescues of minors in half a dozen countries.
The successes are the result of a recent test of a facial recognition tool given to a group of Latin American authorities, investigators and prosecutors by the American company Clearview AI. During a five-day operation in Ecuador in early March, participants from 10 countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Peru have had access to Clearview’s technology, which allows them to upload images and run them through a database of billions of public photos scraped from the Internet.
“It typically takes at least several days for a child to be identified, and sometimes there are victims who have not been identified for years,” says Guillermo Galarza Abizaid, vice president responsible for partnerships and law enforcement at the nonprofit organization with headquartered in Virginia. International Center for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC), which organized the event. “Using Clearview, this happens in seconds.”
The group used the facial recognition tool to analyze a total of 2,198 images and 995 videos, hundreds of them from cold cases. In just three days, they identified 29 attackers and 110 victims, from newborns to 17-year-olds, which investigators then worked to confirm. As of June 13, at least 51 victims had been rescued as a result of the effort, according to ICMEC and government officials interviewed by TIME. “Clearview was a vital resource due to its ability to search and compare faces in its vast database of images extracted from social networks”, says Captain Diego Rafael Calispa, from the Directorate of Children, Adolescence and Family of the Ecuadorian Police.
The operation, which was called Digital Guardians of Niñez, or Digital Guardians for Children, offers a rare glimpse into how Clearview AI has quietly expanded into Latin America and the Caribbean in recent years. Clear vision it now recognizes that it operates in at least five countries in the region: Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Dominican Republic and Trinidad and Tobago. (The company declined to confirm details on court documents which the company stated it also operates in Mexico and Panama.) Clearview has built a team dedicated to selling its services to Latin America and has made its tools available in Spanish and Portuguese. “Here in Latin America we see a lot of adoption and demand,” CEO Hoan Ton-That told TIME.
The expansion into Latin America comes as Clearview, which is used by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and hundreds of police departments in the US, faces a series of lawsuits and fines for allegedly breaching data biometrics and others. privacy laws. Clearview is largely prohibited from selling access to its database to private U.S. companies under a 2022 court settlement. On June 13, the company also agreed to an unusual settlement town in a class-action lawsuit that could give any American whose photos are in Clearview’s database a stake in the company. Several countries in Europe have considered Clearview illegal, imposed heavy financial penalties on the company for violating privacy laws, and tried to ban him from collecting the faces of his citizens.
Clearview’s reception in Latin America and the Caribbean has been much more enthusiastic, and the company sees the region as a promising new market with a more flexible approach to personal data and privacy regulations. “When we received requests from Latin America and South America, it made the most sense for us regulatory-wise,” says Ton-That. “It’s much easier because these tools are permitted.”
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However, the growing adoption of facial recognition tools by law enforcement agencies in Latin America and the Caribbean has alarmed privacy and digital rights advocates. They warn that Clearview’s technology puts most of the world in a “perpetual police lineup,” risking unfair arrests due to false positives, racial profiling, and the potential use as a weapon by governments that could use it against political opponents, while the company continues to train its tools using the personal data of millions of people without their consent.
“While countries in other regions are making efforts to restrict biometric surveillance, Latin American governments appear to be moving in the opposite direction,” says Ángela Alarcón, who works on the Latin America and Caribbean program at Access Now, a nonprofit organization. that advocates for digital rights. Companies like Clearview “take advantage of legislative weaknesses in data protection [and] the lack of authorities with sufficient technical and legal tools to exercise control against abuses and violations”, she states.
Clearview says it carefully reviews the countries where it decides to operate on a case-by-case basis, including their human rights record and any legal restrictions, and also consults with DHS and the State Department. But as more countries look to adopt its tools, a debate is likely to spark over how to balance the benefits of the potentially intrusive technology with privacy rights in a region where officials say Clearview “could be a game changer.” when dealing with cross-border organized organizations. crime, drug cartels and human trafficking.
For Galarza Abizaid, who has spent 25 years training agents around the world on how to investigate online child sexual exploitation, the calculus is clear. “We are dealing with vulnerable children and we are in a race against time here,” he told TIME. “And I’m sure people are willing to give up some privacy if a child is recovered.”
Facial recognition technology has been used by police in Central and South America for more than a decade. Several countries, including Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, have tried it to monitor crowds at football games, subway systems and markets, and even to monitor school attendance. But Clearview’s tools allow civil and military police and law enforcement to display photos of a growing pool of faces harvested from the Internet. to find a match, which often links to social profiles that expose a person’s identity, location, and family members. This database currently contains more than 50 billion images, according to the company, and has been searched more than 2 million times.
In the five Latin American and Caribbean countries where Clearview confirms it is operating, authorities have used facial recognition technology to quickly identify the people behind a wide range of crimes, from credit card fraud to bomb threats and homicides. , as well as to locate kidnapped or missing people. After a death threat was made against the leader of an unidentified Caribbean country, facial recognition technology identified the person behind it in less than 24 hours, the company tells TIME. On some small Caribbean islands with limited resources, Clearview has shortened the process of identifying criminal suspects from a month to an hour, according to local authorities.
One of its most effective uses has been identifying suspects and victims of crimes documented online. Even three months after the five-day Clearview trial, officials who participated in the ICMEC operation continue to make arrests. Contacted by TIME on June 12, Marino Abreu Tejeda, an investigator with the Dominican Republic Attorney General’s office, had just returned from an operation to rescue four more minors identified by Clearview. “We have already placed some suspects in pre-trial detention,” he says.
Outside the US, Clearview has been used most extensively in Ukraine, where it has similarly made initial inroads. In the beginning, the company provided its tools for free to a wartime government besieged by the Russian invasion and eager to find ways to fight back. Within months, 1,500 employees from 18 Ukrainian government agencies were using it to identify Russian soldiers, suspected Ukrainian collaborators and abducted children who were transported to Russia. In interviews in Kiev in October, Ukrainian authorities praised the use of this “secret weapon” to prosecute war crimes and detect infiltrators at checkpoints. Its widespread adoption during the war has alarmed human rights groups and privacy advocates who say the country’s outdated privacy laws might fail to reduce potential surveillance of citizens without proper justification. The company is now being paid for its services in Ukraine.
Critics say this manual is effective. “Latin American countries are easy prey for Clearview AI’s abusive practices,” says Juan Espindola, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) who has studied the application of Clearview in war and crisis situations. “The weakness of many law enforcement agencies in Latin America creates enormous pressure for quick solutions,” he says. “AI and facial recognition are one of those solutions.”
Although the company is just getting started in the region, in the US it has been criticized for incorrectly identifying suspects – especially people of color – and for abuses by authorities. On June 13, a police officer in Indiana resigned later It turned out that he used the powerful facial recognition tool to conduct searches for “personal purposes.”
Ton-That acknowledges that events like the ICMEC operation serve “partly as a marketing issue,” although he says this shows why the technology is particularly suited to supporting law enforcement in regions like Latin America.
In turn, organizations like ICMEC are eager to help expand Clearview to other parts of the world. Galarza Abizaid says his organization is looking to partner with the company for a similar event in Kenya, which would allow African authorities across the continent to try out Clearview’s tools for possible use on thousands of current and cold cases. “Their technology is working and everything is rolling out now,” says Galarza Abizaid. “It feels like we opened Pandora’s box.”
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
