Mass Facial Recognition Program in Gaza Reportedly Used by Israeli Forces to Identify Palestinians
October 7, 2023
A previously undisclosed facial recognition initiative operated by Israeli military intelligence units was reportedly deployed across Gaza after the October 7, 2023 attacks. According to multiple intelligence officers, the program uses Corsight technology alongside Google Photos to identify individuals from checkpoints, crowds, and drone footage. The system has allegedly produced misidentifications, including the widely reported detention of Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha on November 19, 2023.
- Alleged deployer
- unit-8200, israeli-military-intelligence, israeli-government, israel-defense-forces
- Alleged developer
- google-photos, corsight, unknown-israeli-military-integrators
- Alleged harmed parties
- palestinians, mosab-abu-toha, gazans, palestinians-traveling-through-gaza-checkpoints, privacy-and-data-rights-of-gaza-residents, epistemic-integrity, national-security-and-intelligence-stakeholders
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/659
Data source
Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).
When citing the database as a whole, please use:
McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.
Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide
We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.