This AI Knows Who You Are and Who All Your Friends Are (And Is Telling the IRS)

A Bay Area tech company wants to sell AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance software to determine not just who you are but track who your friends are, too.

Vintra is a San Jose-based firm whose “co-appearance” or “correlation analysis” software can, “with a few clicks,” according to the Los Angeles Times, take any individual on a surveillance camera and backtrace him to those he’s seen with most often. From there, the software can take people deemed “likely associates” and locate them on a searchable calendar.

The Times reports that AI-enabled co-appearance technology is already in use in Communist China as part of that country’s Orwellian “social credit” digital report-and-control scheme, but Vintra appears to be the first company to market it in the West.

It’s already in use by the U.S. government:

The firm boasts on its website about relationships with the San Francisco 49ers and a Florida police department. The Internal Revenue Service and additional police departments across the country have paid for Vintra’s services, according to a government contracting database.

The IRS needs to know who your friends are because reasons. Creepy, authoritarian reasons.

Back in December, I wrote about the time facial-recognition software got a New Jersey woman forcibly removed from a Rockettes show at Radio City Music Hall around Thanksgiving because she works for a law firm engaged in a suit against a restaurant owned by the same parent company, MSG Entertainment, that owns Radio City. The lawyer, Kelly Conlon, was not in any way engaged in the long-running suit.

With Vintra’s software, MSG Entertainment could send its guards to remove Conlon’s friends, too, if they were feeling spiteful enough.

Interestingly, Vintra customers don’t seem to want to talk publicly about it:

None of the entities that do business with Vintra that were contacted by The Times acknowledged using the co-appearance feature in Vintra’s software package. But some did not explicitly rule it out.

I’m not sure how far the IRS might go, armed with Vintra. Remember how Lois Lerner weaponized the IRS against Tea Party groups before the 2012 election? Imagine if she had the power to pick and choose whom to audit, too, based on knowing who your friends and political acquaintances are.

It’s a brave new world we’re entering, and I don’t like it one bit.