“The cameras know who you are. Now they want to use AI to find your friends too”, 03 March 2023

…Surveillance technology has long been able to identify you. Now, with help from artificial intelligence, it’s trying to figure out who your friends are.

With a few clicks, this “co-appearance” or “correlation analysis” software can find anyone who has appeared on surveillance frames within a few minutes...The software can instantaneously mark potential interactions between the two men, now deemed likely associates, on a searchable calendar.

Vintra, the San Jose-based company that showed off the technology in an industry video presentation last year, sells the co-appearance feature as part of an array of video analysis tools...

Although co-appearance technology is already used by authoritarian regimes such as China’s, Vintra seems to be the first company marketing it in the West, industry specialists say.

But the firm is one of many testing new AI and surveillance applications with little public scrutiny and few formal safeguards against invasions of privacy…

Industry experts and watchdogs say that if the co-appearance tool is not in use now — and one analyst expressed certainty that it is — it will probably become more reliable and more widely available as artificial intelligence capabilities advance.

None of the entities that do business with Vintra that were contacted by The Times acknowledged using the co-appearance feature in Vintra’s software package. But some did not explicitly rule it out…

Some state and local governments in the U.S. restrict the use of facial recognition, especially in policing, but no federal law applies. No laws expressly prohibit police from using co-appearance searches such as Vintra’s, “but it’s an open question” whether doing so would violate constitutionally protected rights of free assembly and protections against unauthorized searches… Few states have any restrictions on how private entities use facial recognition…

In the absence of national laws, many police departments and private companies have to weigh the balance of security and privacy on their own…

Vintra executives did not return multiple calls and emails from The Times…