- The former Facebook subsidiary Meta is suing Voyager Labs which says it uses AI to forecast crime.
- Voyager Labs can retrace a person’s steps and maybe anticipate their future moves using their social media history.
- William Colston declared that they are “very proud” to have dismantled child trafficking networks and fought terrorism.
The former Facebook subsidiary Meta is suing Voyager Labs, a software company that says it uses artificial intelligence to forecast crime. Among the biggest law enforcement organizations in the United States and the rest of the world that have contracts with Voyager Labs are the police departments of New York City and Los Angeles.
Voyager Labs, which asserts it can use AI to forecast crimes, and the New York Police Department reached a roughly $9 million agreement in 2018.
A federal lawsuit
In a federal lawsuit, Meta alleges that Voyager Labs set up at least 55,000 fictitious identities on Facebook and Instagram to gather personal information about users to identify trends in behavior, extrapolate human behavior, and establish a strong presence on their target(s).
This includes 17,000 phony accounts that were created after Meta terminated Voyager Labs’ access following the federal lawsuit that was filed on January 12.
According to Meta, Voyager Labs can retrace a person’s steps and maybe anticipate their future moves using their social media history. Social media is being used by “offenders” to advance their illegal operations, according to a spokeswoman for the NYPD who talked to The Guardian.
William Colston, a spokesman for Meta, declared that they are “very proud” to have dismantled child trafficking networks and fought terrorism.
Using “a new digital form of stop-and-frisk” to target Black and Latino New Yorkers, STOP, a privacy advocacy charity, called Voyager Labs’ methods. Powerful AI’s potential use for enhancing public safety and protecting individual privacy is at odds with the ongoing federal litigation, which is a heavyweight match.
Between July and at least September 2022, Voyager Labs allegedly gathered information from more than 600,000 Facebook users, including the users’ timeline details, images, videos, friend lists, posts, employment and education details, and self-disclosed geographical details.
According to Meta, Meta’s complaint is “meritless,” “reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how the software products in question work, and, most importantly, is detrimental to U.S. and global public safety,” among other things.
