Clearview AI, the company behind a controversial facial recognition system that scrapes social media sites to add pictures of people to its database, is on the cusp of receiving a patent for its technology. The company confirmed Saturday that the US Trademark and Patent Office had sent it a notice of allowance, which means Clearview's application is set to be granted once the company pays administrative fees. News of the notice was reported earlier Saturday by Politico, which said critics worry that the granting of the patent could speed the development of similar technologies before lawmakers have had time to come to grips with them. Clearview AI's system, which is used by law enforcement agencies including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, has been criticized for feeding its database of billions of images by trawling social media sites and harvesting pictures of people without their consent. The company says the pictures it gathers are publicly available and thus should be fair game.

Well, you're not alone -- 31 per cent of Britons and more than half of Europeans would gladly replace their MPs with artificial intelligences. This finding comes from the latest European Tech Insights Survey report, which was compiled by researchers from the IE University in Spain. The results point to a growing scepticism surrounding'Big Tech' firms but, in the wake of a year of lockdowns, a greater willingness to embrace technology overall. For example, more than 40 per cent of respondents supported the use of controversial facial recognition tech for verifying the identity of citizens. And 64 per cent of Britons and and 72 per cent of Europeans said that they would like to be able to vote in elections using their mobile phones.

The FBI is trialing Amazon's controversial facial recognition tech, Rekognition, as a new method to catch criminals. It began working with the agency in early 2018, according to Nextgov. Rekognition is expected to help speed up the FBI's process of going through video surveillance footage that's collected during investigations. The FBI is trialing Amazon's controversial facial recognition tech, Rekognition, as a new method to catch criminals. The technology could prove to be especially helpful during time-sensitive counterterrorism investigations.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other privacy activists are asking Amazon to stop marketing a powerful facial recognition tool to police, saying law enforcement agencies could use the technology to "easily build a system to automate the identification and tracking of anyone." The tool, called Rekognition, is already being used by at least one agency -- the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon -- to check photographs of unidentified suspects against a database of mug shots from the county jail, which is a common use of such technology around the country. But privacy advocates have been concerned about expanding the use of facial recognition to body cameras worn by officers or safety and traffic cameras that monitor public areas, allowing police to identify and track people in real time. The tech giant's entry into the market could vastly accelerate such developments, the privacy advocates fear, with potentially dire consequences for minorities who are already arrested at disproportionate rates, immigrants who may be in the country illegally or political protesters. "People should be free to walk down the street without being watched by the government," the groups wrote in a letter to Amazon on Tuesday.