The goal: to smoke out details about the use of an app rumoured to offer unprecedented facial recognition capabilities to anyone with a smartphone. Four U.S. cities banned police use of facial recognition outright, the Citizen Lab report noted. The European Union in February proposed a ban on facial recognition in public spaces but later hedged. A U.K. court in April ruled that police facial recognition systems were “unlawful,” marking a significant reversal in surveillance-minded Britain. At least one major study found that some police officers were highly skeptical of predictive policing algorithms.

Source: thestar January 12, 2021 10:01 UTC