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AIAAIC-1413

Israel facial recognition system misidentifies innocent Gazans

A facial recognition system used by Israel in Gaza misidentified scores of innocent Palestinians, resulting in their abduction, interrogration and physical beatings. Unnamed Israeli officials told the New York Times that Israel was using facial recognition technology to identify Hamas operatives and Israeli captives in Gaza. Palestinian prisoners were asked to name people from their communities who they believed were part of Hamas. Israel would then search for those people, hoping they would yield more intelligence, according to the NYT. Developed by Israeli company Corsight, t he system catalogues the faces of unaware Palestinians without their consent and has resulted in the misidentification, abduction and beatings of innocent Palestinians, including the poet Mosab Abu Toha. Corsight CEO Robert Watts recently claimed that the company's technology is 'Built with Privacy, Ethics and world leading Bias reduction at its core'. The discovery underscores legal, ethical and practical concerns about the use of AI for military and extra-judicial purposes. System 🤖 Forsight 🔗 Corsight 🔗 Operator: Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Developer: Corsight Country: Israel/Palestine Sector: Govt - defence Purpose: Identify terrorists Technology: Facial recognition Issue: Ethics/values ; Human/civil rights; Privacy

Date it happened
2024-03-01
Organisation involved
Israel Defense Forces
Where this came from
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This incident was imported from AIAAIC and is used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Our additions to it — the structured fields, the translation, the checks against other reports — are published under the same licence.

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