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May 7, 2019 01:00 pm

How a Mark Cuban-Backed Facial Recognition Firm Pushed To Get Driver License Photo Data

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Now, emails obtained through a public records request provide insight into how facial recognition companies attempt to strike deals with local law enforcement as well as gain access to sensitive data on local residents. The emails show how a firm backed by Shark Tank judge, Dallas Mavericks owner, and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban pushed a local police department to try and gain access to state driver's license photos to train its product. The emails also show the company asked the police department to vouch for it on a government grant application in exchange for receiving the technology for free. "Chief, you seemed pretty keen on the use of facial recognition in stadiums. If you know of any place to start, please let me know," a 2016 email from Jacob Sniff, a co-founder of facial recognition startup Suspect Technologies, addressed to Michael Botieri, chief of the Plymouth Police Department in Massachusetts, reads. In the emails, Sniff repeatedly asked Botieri to deploy the technology in his district to help improve the product. Sniff mentioned plans for the technology to search through results for people of a particular gender or ethnicity, and deploy "emotion recognition." "So you would aim to do this on all or most of the buildings you showed me in person? We would be fine on the privacy concerns for this?" Sniff wrote in a November 2017 email to the police department. "I do realize the technology could be perceived as controversial, though the stark reality is that it could save lives." "Ed, you mentioned that if we did the lobby idea in Boston, that they would go absolutely nuts and it would be a privacy disaster. Our discussion last week was that police departments are supposed to be welcoming and this would ultimately deter people from showing up," Sniff wrote in an April 2018 email chain including Ed Davis, former Boston Police Commissioner and who now runs a security consulting firm. [...] Sniff asked Chief Botieri to sign a letter helping Suspect Technologies receive a grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), according to a January 2017 email. Sniff offered to give the police department the facial recognition technology for free in exchange for signing the letter.

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