Can we talk about the fact that such a tool exists? A private company is able to take a photo and identify you. Scary shit!
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Actually neither happened. The article says they were not able to find any identifiable information online. They had to use drivers license instead.
> the fire marshal sent links to Clearview AI face search results, an archive of school play photos and another to an archive of high school formal photos. He said he couldn’t find associated social media but offered to get a driver’s license photo for the detective. “We have access to that,” he wrote.
I read the sequence as,
1. They started with a protest video
2. Clearview provided public images of the same person, but no name. It was certainly more identifiable (e.g., their high school).
3. Then somehow they get the driver's license photo. Do they use the original protest video, or the Clearview images? How does this search even work? Nobody knows. Lazy journalism.
As readers, we have no idea if the Clearview search was actually important, or a dead end.
>A minute later, the detective sent the fire marshal Ahmed’s name, date of birth and driver’s license number. Within five minutes, the fire marshal replied, “Bingo.”
I believe that is supposed to say that the fire marshal sent the detective the license information. The Fire Marshal was clearly able to find identifiable information online, in the form of multiple high school photos, but was unsuccessful getting a match to any social media accounts. So the facial recognition worked and found matches in Clearview AI’s database of scraped school photos, but not their database of scraped social media photos.
Then the Fire Marshal offered to get a driver’s license photo, and says he has access [presumably to the DMV database]. The fact the about a minute later, license information was passed, sounds like a search was run by the Fire Marshal, a match popped up, and he sent it to the detective. But it could be that the detective used high school photos (being higher quality and full front facing) to run a search against the DMV records (which the police have access to with “permission from supervisors”) but according to other articles about the NYPD in general, it doesn't seem like that are able to run facial recognition on DMV records.
Either way, I think the ID came directly from the information the Fire Marshal passed and the Judge said as much.
>The NYPD would not have identified Ahmed but for the FDNY’s Clearview AI search and accessing the DMV photo, the judge indicated in her ruling