American “The Intercept” website has accused ‘Israel’ of using Google software to set a hit list of assassination against Palestinians in Gaza.
The Intercept showed that the mass surveillance of Palestinian faces was used during people’s displacement to the south with effort to identify Hamas members who were invloved in 7-October attack.
Thousands of Gaza residents since October 7 were arrested, and they had been brutally interrogated or tortured often with little or no evidence.
Among those people who fell victims to the non accuracy of such facial recognition software was the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha. He was, later, released without being charged with any crime, reporting that Israeli soldiers told him his facial recognition-enabled arrest had been a “mistake.”
The website said the use of Google Photos’s machine learning-powered analysis features to place civilians under military scrutiny, or worse, is at odds with the company’s clearly stated rules.
Under the header “Dangerous and Illegal Activities,” Google warns that Google Photos cannot be used “to promote activities, goods, services, or information that cause serious and immediate harm to people.”
Google company has for many years claimed to embrace various global human rights standards. However, the Israeli military’s use of a free, publicly available Google product like Photos raises questions about these corporate human rights commitments, and the extent to which the company is willing to actually act upon them.
Astonishingly, Google spokesperson Joshua Cruz did not respond to repeated subsequent attempts to clarify Google’s position on the claims, stating only that “Google Photos is a free product which is widely available to the public that helps you organize photos by grouping similar faces, so you can label people to easily find old photos. It does not provide identities for unknown people in photographs.”
Anna Bacciarelli, the associate tech director at Human Rights Watch stressed that facial recognition surveillance of this type undermines rights enshrined in international human rights law — privacy, non-discrimination, expression, assembly rights, and more.
She demanded Google to take an appropriate action in the context in which this technology is being used by Israeli forces, amid widespread, ongoing, and systematic denial of the human rights of people in Gaza.
Since 2021, Google employees have taken part in the “No Tech for Apartheid campaign” against Israel-Google joint Project Nimbus, calling their employer as well to prevent the Israeli military from using Photos’s facial recognition to prosecute the war in Gaza.
The group of employees said in a statement that the Israeli military is even weaponizing consumer technology like Google Photos, using the included facial recognition to identify Palestinians as part of their surveillance apparatus.
They added that this indicates that the Israeli military will use any technology made available to them unless Google takes steps to ensure their products don’t contribute to ethnic cleansing, occupation, and genocide.
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