Social media companies relying on artificial intelligence software to moderate their platforms are generating unviable reports on cases of child sexual abuse, preventing US police from seeing potential leads and delaying investigations of alleged predators, the Guardian can reveal. By law, US-based social media companies are required to report any child sexual abuse material detected on their platforms to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). NCMEC acts as a nationwide clearinghouse for leads about child abuse, which it forwards to the relevant law enforcement departments in the US and around the world. The organization said in its annual report that it received more than 32m reports of suspected child sexual exploitation from companies and the public in 2022, roughly 88m images, videos and other files. Meta is the largest reporter of these tips, with more than 27m, or 84%, generated by its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms in 2022.

Mr Aguilar says Miami police treats facial recognition like a tip. "We don't make an arrest because an algorithm tells us to," he says. "We either put that name in a photographic line-up or we go about solving the case through traditional means."

It has been more than two months since the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police in the United States. And as protests continue - the message is no longer just about specific incidents of violence, but about what demonstrators say is systemic racism in policing. One of the most obvious examples is the widespread use of facial recognition systems that have been proven to misidentify people of colour.

Amazon may have banned police from using its facial recognition technology, but a new report shows the tech giant is providing thousands of departments with video and audio footage from Ring. Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends civil liberties, found over 1,400 agencies are working with the Amazon-owned company and hundreds of them have'deadly histories.' Data from sources reveals half of the agencies had at least one fatal encounter in the last five years and altogether are responsible for a third of fatal encounters nationwide. These departments are also involved with the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Alton Sterling, Botham Jean, Antonio Valenzuela, Michael Ramos and Sean Monterrosa. Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends civil liberties, found over 1,400 agencies are working with Amazon-owned Ring and hundreds of them have'deadly histories' DailyMail.com

This week IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft all said they would halt sales of facial recognition to US police and called on Congress to impose rules on use of the technology. A police reform bill introduced in the House of Representatives Monday by prominent Democrats in response to weeks of protest over racist policing practices would do just that. But some privacy advocates say its restrictions aren't tight enough and could legitimize the way police use facial recognition today. "We're concerned," says Neema Guliani, senior legislative counsel for the ACLU in Washington, DC, citing evidence that many facial recognition algorithms are less accurate on darker skin tones. She urges a federal ban on facial recognition "unless and until it can be used in a way that respects civil liberties;" Guliani says it's not clear that that is possible.

Hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the US have started using a new facial recognition system from Clearview AI, a new investigation by The New York Times has revealed. The database is made up of billions of images scraped from millions of sites including Facebook, YouTube, and Venmo. The Times says that Clearview AI's work could "end privacy as we know it," and the piece is well worth a read in its entirety. The use of facial recognition systems by police is already a growing concern, but the scale of Clearview AI's database, not to mention the methods it used to assemble it, is particularly troubling. The Clearview system is built upon a database of over three billion images scraped from the internet, a process which may have violated websites' terms of service.

Police shootings in the US frequently make local and national headlines, but there is no government-run database of the fatalities. So people are turning to machine learning to make sure no shooting by the police goes unrecorded. Working out how many people in the US have been killed as result of police action isn't easy. Where they do exist, official records are somewhat lacking. A 2016 study by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics found that police records cover half as many police-related deaths as media reports.