Forbes (April 16, 2018) has uncovered that over the last five years a secretive surveillance company founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer has been quietly building a massive facial recognition database consisting of faces acquired from the giant social network, YouTube and countless other websites. That database forms the core of a facial recognition service called Face-Int, now owned by Israeli vendor Verint after it snapped up the product's creator, little-known surveillance company Terrogence, in 2017. Both Verint and Terrogence have long been vendors for the U.S. government, providing bleeding-edge spy tech to the NSA, the U.S. Navy and countless other intelligence and security agencies.
Jennifer Lynch, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that if the facial recognition database had been shared with the US government, it would threaten the free speech and privacy rights of social media users. This could impact the travel and civil rights of tens of thousands of law-abiding travelers who would then have to prove they are not the terrorist or criminal the system has identified them to be.
A YouTube video from 2015 advertises this facial recognition database.
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