Name: US police forces using controversial facial recognition technology - BBC News
Uploaded: 2025-07-28T17:14:48.000Z
Duration: 17 min 59 s
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In March 2017, Andrew Conlin got into a friend's car.

A few minutes later, they smashed into this tree.

Modal verbs - B1

If it wasn't for facial recognition technology,

I think we made it about a mile and a half into a three-mile trip.

I mean, I was saying, you know, slow down, but it was falling on deaf ears.

I'd basically reached the conclusion that somebody was going to die that night.

The driver was thrown into bushes nearby.

I'm very fortunate to have walked away from that wreck.

One of the first people on the scene pulled Andrew out of the car.

Despite the man's testimony, the police suspect Andrew was in fact the driver.

There was no way that that's the passenger.

The passenger side of the vehicle was all smashed in.

There's no way the passenger survived that.

After telling the police what happened, the man left the scene without making a formal statement.

Do we know where this person is that pulled him out?

After a lengthy investigation, the police concluded that Andrew had been the driver.

He was charged with vehicular homicide, punishable with up to 15 years in prison.

Andrew's only hope was for his legal team to track down the man who pulled him from the car.

This unknown man could prove Andrew wasn't driving.

We printed up pictures of him off of the body cam, handed them out at every shop, every, you know, Starbucks downtown, put it on social media, and no one knew who he was.

Chris and his colleagues convinced a team of investigators

Chris and his colleagues convinced a controversial facial recognition company to license their technology and help find the witness.

They ran a search of this image from the police body cam footage using artificial intelligence.

This AI popped him up in, like, three to five seconds.

Chris and his team finally found their key witness,

Were you surprised that he was being charged with vehicular homicide?

Oh, I was, because I remember telling him what happened.

It's like, wow, I can't believe this is still going on.

I thought it was case closed, all right, you know.

He wasn't the driver, but it was a shock to me.

What do you remember about where he was in the car?

I remember he was in the passenger seat, but he was mangled up where, like, that side definitely, like, had him crushed in with the seatbelt on.

So it took me a while to take it off and try to get his feet and body over the centre console to get him out of the vehicle.

So he was definitely in the passenger seat?

We knew at that point we were going to win this case, and within an hour of him giving this testimony, this deposition, the case was dropped.

They called me that afternoon and said, hey, it was, you know, it went as expected and they've dropped the case.

After spending years facing a potential prison sentence,

Andrew could finally move on with his life.

The facial recognition technology that Andrew's lawyers used is New York-based Clearview AI.

The company has been fined over and over again for scraping billions of users' photos in countries including the UK, Greece, Italy and France.

Critics say a controversial start-up poses a new and profound threat to everyone's privacy.

A company called Clearview AI has the largest known facial recognition database of images in the US, larger than the FBI's.

The company is run by this man, Juan Tontat.

He's the eccentric founder of Clearview AI, a privately owned company that promises the most comprehensive image search solutions in the world.

I want to find out how many pictures the system could find of me.

But as you scroll down, there'll be photos that are less similar or if you see a plus one or plus two.

Clearview scours the internet for images.

A powerful algorithm compares size, shape and distance between facial features to find potential matches.

It's wild how many pictures are just out there on the open web.

The search finds pictures I've literally never seen before.

I'm in the back of someone's profile picture and it still finds me.

And it's picked me up because I am right in the back there.

It doesn't need to be a picture that you uploaded or your friends uploaded.

It's just if you're in the back of a picture, you can still be found.

It's a really surreal, accurate technology.

In the database, there's about 30 billion images.

Because I guess the debate is some people say this is just Google for faces and other people say this is going to change privacy as we know it.

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US police forces using controversial facial recognition technology - BBC News

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