Angela Lipps, a 50-year-old grandma from Tennessee, spent more than five months in jail after the AI facial recognition platform Clearview AI falsely matched the grandmother with a suspect of bank fraud more than 1,000 miles away in North Dakota.

Fargo police chief Dave Zibolski admitted to CNN that there were a "couple of errors" in the investigation that led to Lipps' arrest.

A "partner agency’s facial recognition technology” and “additional investigative steps independent of AI to assist in identification” led to a warrant being issued for Lipps, Zibolski said.

The grandma was arrested on July 14 while looking after four children. Authorities in Tennessee held Lipps in county jail for 108 days before she was extradited to Fargo. Lipps says she had never even been to the state of North Dakota before her arrest.

According to her GoFundMe page, Lipps found out that a woman in North Dakota stole tens of thousands of dollars from banks in Fargo using a fake military ID. Clearview AI matched the fake ID image with Lipps in Tennessee.

The case against Lipps fell apart in December when the lawyer she was given in Fargo was able to produce bank records showing Lipps was at a gas station and ordering pizza in Tennessee at the time that authorities claimed she was in North Dakota.

Lipps was released on Christmas Eve, after nearly 5 months in prison. Lipps says she lost her home, income, car, and health insurance as a result of her imprisonment.

What is Clearview AI?

Clearview AI is a tech company that has plenty of charges from critics on its rap sheet already. it has created massive facial-scan databases by scraping photos from social media platforms and other places on the internet, then training its machine learning algorithms on them.

In 2020, Facebook sent Clearview AI a cease and desist over the mass photo scraping. Other tech companies like YouTube, Twitter, and Venmo also requested that Clearview AI stop scraping its platforms. Clearview AI claimed it had a "First Amendment right" to the data.

In 2022, a legal settlement with the ACLU resulted in Clearview AI agreeing to stop selling access to its tool to private businesses. However, it did not bar Clearview AI from working with law enforcement.

While Fargo police have admitted to making mistakes in the investigation, authorities have not yet apologized to Lipps for her ordeal. Lipps' attorneys are currently looking at filing a civil rights claim.

fizkes / Shutterstock.com

Gen Z is entering the workforce in a job market defined by uncertainty, rapid change, and higher expectations for how quickly early-career employees should perform. Many are meeting that challenge with a new kind of support system: their parents. Zety’s Career Copiloting Report reveals the surprising ways parents are guiding Gen Z through the job market. From first applications to negotiating…

Motortion Films / Shutterstock.com

While empathy is widely celebrated as a hallmark of good leadership, managers may benefit from keeping some emotional distance. New research from Zety and SIGMA Assessment Systems suggests that in environments where difficult calls are routine, emotional detachment can be an asset. Analyzing nearly two decades of SIGMA’s proprietary Jackson Personality Inventory – Revised (JPI-R) assessments…