Boston Police Used Facial Recognition Technology to Capture Every Face at a Recent Music Festival On May 25 and 26 of 2013, Boston police tested an advanced facial recognition system to monitor concert-goers at the Boston Calling Festival. Recently, independent investigators with Dig uncovered documents on the Dark Web, showing how IBM was contracted by the city’s government to provide technology that would keep track of all 20,000 attendees at last year’s festival. Norton went on to say that “The City of Boston did not pursue long-term use of this software or enter into a contract to utilize this software on a permanent basis.” The reason? According to Norton: “From the City’s perspective, we have not seen a clear use case for this software that held practical value for the City’s public safety needs. [Boston officials] are still exploring options for situational awareness software, but we lack a policy guiding use of this software because we do not have any in place at this time. There are a number of challenges presented by using this type of software, including, but not limited to, infrastructure support as well as legal and privacy concerns.” Alex Marthews, of Digital Fourth, believes that this technology could be used to “capture anybody’s image and process it for law enforcement purposes just in case they later turn out to be guilty of something.” The testing of this technology was a pilot for IBM’s “Smart Cities Initiative”, which plans for widespread and permanent implementation throughout the country.
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 07:27:25 +0000
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