WHAT IS IT?
The ambitious company wants TO become one of the world's leading merchants of surveillance technology, even as some lawmakers worry the company poses a dangerous threat to civil liberties and privacy rights.
WHY IMPORTANT
One hundred billion images in its' index of faces are the goal. Lawmakers worry the company poses a dangerous threat to Americans' privacy rights. Those images — equivalent to 14 photos for each of the 7 billion people on Earth — would help power a surveillance system used for arrests and criminal investigations by thousands of law enforcement and government agencies around the world.
The company wants to expand beyond scanning faces for the police, saying it could monitor "gig economy" workers. They are researching several new technologies that could identify someone based on how they walk, detect their location from a photo, or scan their fingerprints from afar.
