New Jersey halts police use of creepy Clearview AI facial-recognition app

New Jersey is ahead of the curve — at least when it comes to stopping its law enforcement from using the creepy and potentially biased facial-recognition app Clearview AI.

The app, which scraped billions of photos from the likes of Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and other online platforms, drew the world's attention last weekend following a detailed report in the New York Times. The app's supposed capability to identify practically anyone from even low-quality photos frightened privacy advocates and officials. And today, one of the latter — New Jersey's attorney general Gurbir Grewal — actually did something about it.

According to the ACLU of New Jersey, attorney general Grewal "put a moratorium on Clearview AI’s chilling, unregulated facial recognition software."

"AG asked that all law enforcement agencies in New Jersey stop using Clearview’s technology until we get a better handle on the situation," explained the New Jersey attorney general's director of communications, Sharon Lauchaire, over email. "We have communicated this request to the 21 County Prosecutors, and asked that they share it with all of the police departments and other law enforcement agencies within their respective jurisdictions."

Notably, Lauchaire told Mashable that her office is "not sure how long this process will take." In other words, Clearview AI may be on the outs in New Jersey for some time.

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This news was also confirmed by NJ.com, which reported Friday afternoon that Grewal ordered all New Jersey police to cease their use of the tool (at least for now).

The ACLU of New Jersey emphasized in its statement that facial-recognition technology, like Clearview AI, is problematic for all kinds of known and troubling reasons.

"Facial recognition tech has been trained on databases filled primarily with white, male faces," wrote the organization. "That leads to discrimination and false-positives of people of color, women, and non-binary people."

This rather alarming fact was recently confirmed by a federal study which found that "the highest false positives are in American Indians, with elevated rates in African American and Asian populations."

We reached out to Clearview AI for comment, but received no immediate response.

This is not the first of the company's troubles, nor do we imagine it will be the last. Just earlier this week, Twitter demanded that Clearview AI stop using any photos it had scraped from the social media platform, and a class action lawsuit is already in the works.

Meanwhile, in a statement on its site, Clearview AI insists that "Clearview is not a surveillance system and is not built like one."

It would appear New Jersey's attorney general would disagree.

UPDATE: Jan. 24, 2020, 5:10 p.m. PST: This story was updated to include comment from the New Jersey attorney general's director of communications, Sharon Lauchaire.