Private citizens are using AI-driven surveillance to turn the tables on law enforcement. Activists are using face recognition to identify abusive cops, according to The New York Times.

Marketers are using computer vision to parse customers by skin color and other perceived racial characteristics. A number of companies are pitching race classification as a way for businesses to understand the buying habits of different groups.

AI is helping avert traffic accidents by assessing the risk of car crashes at specific intersections. MicroTraffic, a Canadian video analytics company, predicts the odds that accidents will occur at intersections that traditional methods overlook.

With the rise of AI-driven surveillance, anonymity is in fashion. Researchers are working on clothing that evades face recognition systems and designed a t-shirt that tricks a variety of object detection models into failing to spot people.

A major retailer’s AI-powered surveillance program apparently targeted poor people and minorities. Rite-Aid, a U.S.-based pharmacy chain, installed face recognition systems in many of its New York and Los Angeles stores.

Football clubs are turning to computer vision for winning insights. Acronis, a Swiss cloud storage and security company, offers AI services designed to give a boost to some of the world’s top football clubs (soccer teams, to Americans), Wired reported.

Some tech companies boast that their AI will change the world. Apple’s latest just aims to make your life a little easier. Apple unveiled a flock of modest conveniences powered by machine learning at its annual developer conference.

Three of the biggest AI vendors pledged to stop providing face recognition services to police — but other companies continue to serve the law-enforcement market.

Baidu backed out of a U.S.-led effort to promote ethics in AI, leaving the project without a Chinese presence. The Beijing-based search giant withdrew from the Partnership on AI, a consortium that promotes cooperation on issues like digital privacy and algorithmic bias.

Vendors of face recognition are updating their tech as people don masks to protect against Covid-19. Police are bound to take notice. Companies that provide computer vision systems, including at least one that supplies law enforcement agencies, are training models to recognize obscured faces.

Will reading soon become obsolete? A new system converts text articles into videos. VidPress, a prototype project from Chinese tech giant Baidu, currently generates more than 1,000 narrated video summaries of news stories daily.

Cameras that detect face masks are helping French authorities to evaluate citizens’ adherence to government mandates intended to fight Covid-19. Starting this week, everyone riding public transportation in France is required to wear a face mask.

Hoping to keep surveillance capitalists from capitalizing on your face? Safeguard your selfies with a digital countermeasure. Researchers devised a program that subtly alters portrait photos to confuse face recognition models without distorting the image to the human eye.

In an online dating profile, the photo that highlights your physical beauty may not be the one that makes you look smart or honest — also important traits in a significant other. A new neural network helps pick the most appealing shots.

Real-time face recognition has become standard operating procedure for cops in a few cities, in both authoritarian and democratic countries. After years of trials, police departments in Moscow and London are using face recognition to scan the streets for suspected criminals.