According to reports, Israel’s military intelligence has been utilizing an experimental facial recognition program in Gaza that has mistakenly identified Palestinian civilians as having ties to Hamas. Google Photos is said to be involved in the program’s implementation, although there is no direct collaboration with the company.
The surveillance program initially aimed to search for Israeli hostages in Gaza but was expanded to target individuals with ties to Hamas or other militant groups. The technology, developed by the Israeli company Corsight, is supposed to be able to accurately recognize people even with less than half of their faces exposed, including extreme angles, darkness, and poor quality conditions.
However, the technology has been found to struggle with grainy, obscured, or injured faces, resulting in false positives and misidentifications. Israeli officers reportedly used Google Photos to supplement Corsight’s technology by uploading data of known persons of interest to the service to flag them among surveillance materials.
A Google spokesperson clarified that Google Photos only groups faces from images that users have added to their library and does not identify unknown individuals in photographs.
One individual mistakenly detained through the program, poet Mosab Abu Toha, was reportedly handcuffed, blindfolded, beaten, and interrogated for two days before being released. He claimed to have no connection to Hamas and was unaware of the Israeli facial recognition program in Gaza.
The story has been updated to include a statement from Google regarding the matter.
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