Based on a report from the New York Times, Israeli military intelligence used an experimental facial recognition program to identify civilians in Gaza, Palestine who have ties to Hamas.
Google Photos is also suspected of having a role in helping this program. This surveillance program reportedly started as a way to search for Israeli hostages in Gaza.
However, as is often the case with new technologies in times of war, the initiative was quickly expanded to root out anyone with ties to Hamas or other militant groups, according to the New York Times.
The technology has flaws, but the Israeli army reportedly does not treat it as such when detaining civilians flagged by the system. According to intelligence officials who spoke to the New York Times, the program uses technology from the private Israeli company Corsight.
The Tel Aviv-headquartered company promises its surveillance system can accurately recognize people and claims the system can be effective even at extreme angles, even from dark drones, or poor image quality.
However, an officer in Israel's Unit 8200 noticed that, in reality, this technology often had difficulty identifying faces that were blurred, blurred, or injured.
According to the official, Corsight's technology includes false positive results and there have been many cases of Palestinians being identified accurately but incorrectly, even being marked as having ties to Hamas.
Three Israeli officers told The New York Times that its military uses Google Photos to complement Corsight technology. Intelligence officials allegedly uploaded data containing people known to be of interest to Google services, allowing them to use the app's photo search feature to flag them among surveillance material.
One officer said that Google's ability to match partially obscured faces is superior to Corsight, but they still use Corsight because it is customizable.
Reported from Engadgdet, a Google spokesperson emphasized that the product only groups faces from images that have been added to the user's library.
"Google Photos is a free product widely available to the public that helps you organize photos by grouping similar faces together, so you can tag people to easily find old photos. This product doesn't provide identification for people who don't recognized in the photo," wrote Google.
One of the people wrongly detained through this surveillance program was poet Mosab Abu Toha, who said he was forcibly pulled to a military checkpoint in northern Gaza when his family tried to flee to Egypt.
He was then allegedly handcuffed and blindfolded, then beaten and interrogated for two days before finally being returned. He said that soldiers told him before being released that his interrogation was a mistake.
The author of Poems From Gaza said that he had no ties to Hamas and was not aware of Israel's facial recognition program in Gaza. However, during his detention, he said that he heard someone say that the Israeli army had used new technology against the group holding him.check our gambar itasoft
