Tech
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March 10, 2021
Immigrant rights organizations Mijente Support Committee and NorCal Resist Fund, along with four activists sued facial recognition company Clearview AI Inc. and other unknown defendants on Tuesday for their purported unlawful surveillance. The plaintiffs seek to enjoin the defendants from “illegally acquiring, storing, and selling their likenesses, and the likenesses of millions of Californians, in its quest to create a cyber surveillance state.”
The Alameda County, Calif. complaint recounted Clearview AI’s allegedly illicit scraping and collection of more than three billion photographs of individuals without their knowledge or consent in order to create its facial recognition database. The plaintiffs added that Clearview AI has “provided thousands of government agencies, and private entities access to its database, which they can use to identify people.” The plaintiffs alleged that Clearview AI’s “mass surveillance technology d
Facial recognition software company a new A new lawsuit claims, Clearview AI has appropriated the identities of billions of ‘unsuspecting’ people from websites including social media platforms to sell to police, chilling the right to free speech and endangering immigrants and people of colour. Dreamstime/TNS
SAN JOSE, California: Facial recognition software company Clearview AI has appropriated the identities of billions of “unsuspecting” people from websites including social media platforms to sell to police, chilling the right to free speech and endangering immigrants and people of color, a new lawsuit claims.
“Clearview also scrapes images of people that were uploaded without their knowledge or consent, including images posted by friends or relatives and even images of people who inadvertently appear in the backgrounds of photographs taken by strangers,” the suit filed Tuesday in Alameda County Superior Court alleged.
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is representing four racial and immigrant justice groups Just Futures Law, MediaJustice, Mijente Support Committee, and the Immigrant Defense Project suing the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for withholding critical records about the collection and sharing of data during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The four groups all filed FOIA requests for information about COVID-related surveillance and data analysis last year. In particular, the groups are worried about HHS Protect, a vast secretive data platform designed by controversial data software company Palantir. Palantir has a long history of building surveillance systems for the Department of Homeland Security that facilitate criminal prosecutions, family separation, and raids that lead to detention and deportation. In July of last year, the government required all hospitals to report COVID-19 infection d
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Voting rights groups are warning that early voting site closures in Georgia are limiting Black and Latino turnout in the state s two highly-anticipated Senate runoff elections even as a federal judge on Monday ordered two counties to reverse a decision purging more than 4,000 voters from the rolls.
Election officials in Hall County, which is located about an hour northeast of Atlanta and includes Gainesville, have opened four early voting sites, down from eight locations in the November election. The county is home to more than 200,000 people, nearly 40% of whom are Latino or Black. Multiple advocacy groups said that the closures were centered in areas with large Black and Latino populations, HuffPost reported.
Georgia poll closures limit Black, Latino voting in Senate runoffs, advocates say
Travis Waldron
December 23, 2020, 1:50 PM
A coalition of voting rights groups on Wednesday denounced election officials in Hall County, Georgia, for opening fewer early voting sites, which the groups say is limiting turnout of Black and Latino voters during crucial January runoff elections that will determine control of the U.S. Senate.
Officials in the county, which is located about an hour northeast of Atlanta, opened four polling locations when early voting in the runoffs began Dec. 14. That’s down from eight early voting locations for the November elections.