Facial Recognition Company's Employees Abused Tech To Sexually Harass Coworkers
from the just-amazing-stuff-they're-doing-these-days-with-AI dept
Someone wants to out-evil Clearview. Now, there are a lot of questionable facial recognition tech vendors but most have decided to cede "most hated" to Clearview. But another startup thinks it should generate as much ill will as possible before securing prominent marketplace status.
The unanswered question, I guess, is whether to direct your AI-enabled sociopathy at random individuals or your own coworkers. While Clearview has allowed police officers, private companies, authoritarian regimes, billionaires, and politicians to "run wild" with baseless searches of its 4 billion scraped images, a Silicon Valley company has taken a hands-off approach to internal "testing" of its tech. Joseph Cox has more details for Motherboard.
Verkada, a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup, equips its offices in downtown San Mateo, California, with its own state-of-the-art security cameras.
Last year, a sales director on the company's sales team abused their access to these cameras to take and post photos of colleagues in a Slack channel called #RawVerkadawgz where they made sexually explicit jokes about women who worked at the company, according to a report in IPVM, which Motherboard independently verified and obtained more information about.
"Face match… find me a squirt," the sales director wrote in the company Slack channel in August 2019, according to one screenshot obtained by Motherboard.
Charming. And one more reason why everyone should be extremely wary of companies promising to do only good things with their surveillance products. If employees can abuse the tech, anyone can. Handing it over to entities with the power to take away people's freedom just compounds the problems. If the tech has already been abused before it even ships, are we supposed to believe customers won't do the same horrible things once they have it in their possession?
Verkada's proprietary "face search" prompted a cascade of abusive behavior by Verkada employees. The tech can pinpoint single faces in a crowd of faces. This led to a group of male employees sexually harassing female employees, utilizing the tech to turn images captured by the company's surveillance cameras into their personal degradation playground.
According to three sources who worked at Verkada at the time, the group of men posted sexually graphic content about multiple female employees in similar Slack messages.
This may say more about people than about the tech, but the refusal to believe shitty people like this exist everywhere -- even at government agencies -- should be a fatal flaw. It's impossible to prevent all abuse of tech like this, but Verkada's weak response suggests it won't dump customers who engage in similar behavior.
After the Slack channel was reported to the company's Human Resource team in February, Verkada's CEO Filip Kaliszan announced in a company all-hands meeting that an undisclosed number of employees active in the Slack channel were given the choice between leaving the company or having their share of stock reduced. All of them chose the latter option, and the Slack channel was removed, according to four employees who worked at Verkada during the time.The person who posted the screenshot still works at Verkada.
Verkada's killer app is its "face search." This allows users to target an individual across multiple cameras and recordings, rather than manually search recordings for an individual. Its algorithm searches recordings for uploaded faces, returning everything that matches to make sifting through recordings that much easier. Its roster of clients includes law enforcement agencies.
The company's first comment stated that it "does not tolerate sexual harassment." But giving harassers the choice between being fired and taking a theoretical hit to stock options isn't exactly the model of intolerance. Fortunately, the company has revised its position following this nationwide exposure of its employees' abuse of the tech.
Upon a further review of this incident and feedback from several employees about how it was initially addressed, we have terminated the three individuals who instigated this incident, engaged in egregious behavior targeting coworkers, or neglected to report the behavior despite their obligations as managers.
All well and good, but this incident happened in 2019 and Verkada management was informed of it as early as August of last year. An "all hands" meeting in March of this year resulted in the incident being brought up again. There was no response from the management team at that point. It wasn't until Motherboard asked Verkada for comment prior to publication that the company finally addressed the issue. And even then, it gave violators the option to stay onboard in exchange for some stock options.
If the product is being abused by the company that makes it, it will be abused by its customers. This fact cannot be argued. Combine this tech with the databases full of personal info government agencies have access to and you've got dozens of potential misuse cases on your hands. Verkada employees can't be trusted with their own tech. No one else should be trusted with it either.
Filed Under: creep, facial recognition, privacy, sexual harassment, surveillance
Companies: verkada
