US police forces using controversial facial recognition technology - BBC News

Our Take

BBC News just put a number on something we've been warning about for years: 30 billion faces, scraped from Facebook, Instagram, and anywhere else Clearview AI's crawlers could reach, now sitting in a database that police departments across the country can query like a phone book. Nobody consented to this. Nobody was asked. Your face, tagged at a birthday party a decade ago, is now a permanent line item in a corporate surveillance product sold to law enforcement.

This is the same pattern we track every day with license plate readers — a private company builds a mass surveillance tool, markets it to police as a convenience, and the public only finds out after it's already embedded in daily policing. Clearview and Flock Safety aren't identical technologies, but they're the same business model: harvest data at scale, sell access to government, skip the debate about whether any of this should be legal in the first place. Facial recognition tracks who you are: ALPR networks track where you go. Together they're building a surveillance grid most Americans never voted for.

Credit to BBC News for putting hard numbers behind a story that too often stays abstract. If you want to see how this plays out on the ground in your own community, check our camera map to find the ALPR nodes near you, and visit our take-action page for ways to push back before these systems become permanent infrastructure.