F or the past three months, a small encrypted group chat of Latin American officials who investigate online child-exploitation cases has been lighting

A Controversial Facial-Recognition Company Quietly Expands Into Latin America

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2024-06-23 19:00:09

F or the past three months, a small encrypted group chat of Latin American officials who investigate online child-exploitation cases has been lighting up with reports of raids, arrests, and rescued minors in half a dozen countries.

The successes are the result of a recent trial of a facial-recognition tool given to a group of Latin American law-enforcement officials, investigators, and prosecutors by the American company Clearview AI. During a five-day operation in Ecuador in early March, participants from 10 countries including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Peru were given access to Clearview’s technology, which allows them to upload images and run them through a database of billions of public photos scraped from the Internet.

"Normally it takes at least several days for a child to be identified, and sometimes there are victims that have not been identified for years," says Guillermo Galarza Abizaid, the vice president in charge of partnerships and law enforcement at the Virginia-based nonprofit International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC), which organized the event. "Using Clearview, it's within seconds."