Kashmir Hill writes:
In May 2019, an agent at the Department of Homeland Security received a trove of unsettling images. Found by Yahoo in a Syrian user’s account, the photos seemed to document the sexual abuse of a young girl. One showed a man with his head reclined on a pillow, gazing directly at the camera. The man appeared to be white, with brown hair and a goatee, but it was hard to really make him out; the photo was grainy, the angle a bit oblique. The agent sent the man’s face to child-crime investigators around the country in the hope that someone might recognize him.
When an investigator in New York saw the request, she ran the face through an unusual new facial-recognition app she had just started using, called Clearview AI.
… The app turned up an odd hit: an Instagram photo of a heavily muscled Asian man and a female fitness model, posing on a red carpet at a bodybuilding expo in Las Vegas. The suspect was neither Asian nor a woman. But upon closer inspection, you could see a white man in the background, at the edge of the photo’s frame, standing behind the counter of a booth for a workout-supplements company. That was the match. On Instagram, his face would appear about half as big as your fingernail. The federal agent was astounded.
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