Perhaps it's just my schadenfreude acting up but I pray to sweet baby Jesus that they try to bust somebody with this. I'd love to see a whole bunch of engineers from Clearview AI get a proper shellacking on the stand from a criminal defense attorney. I don't see how anything from this product could be used as evidence without the algorithms being questioned or exposed in court.
That's not what would happen, though. The police will use this tech on poor people who can't afford their own attorneys, and public defenders are too overworked, underpaid, and/or cynical to try to push back against the system. On the off chance that a rich person gets falsely arrested due to this tech the prosecution will probably immediately settle out of court to avoid scrutiny. This same scenario has played out over the last decade or so with the Stingray device[1] in particular and various forms of warrantless (or essentially warrantless) wiretapping in general. Even if facial recognition tech is officially banned or restricted, it will probably be used secretly and covered up using parallel construction[2].
The facial recognition is likely 'only' used as a pursuit/detection mechanism. Presumably/hopefully when making a case in court they use traditional evidence like eyewitness identification, DNA, etc.
Novel evidence like this is probably unlikely to do well in court for the reasons you describe.
In the specific instance described in the article, the police and prosecutor failed to produce any more evidence than the facial recognition match.
Nevertheless, they imprisoned a man for ten days, and proceeded to press for criminal charges over the course of the year. As described the man had to spend his entire savings on this defense.
The court system worked correctly, in that the judge told the prosecutor to produce more evidence. The charges were dismissed.
So we have the "happy" ending of a man whose life has been turned upside down, whose financial situation has been ruined, and who has had to spend his time and effort defending himself rather than contributing to society in a positive way. All because facial recognition was used as the only piece of evidence.
How many people have these engineers been arresting? This is news to me. I'm shocked!! They don't have the power to arrest people. How is this being allowed?!
