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AI facial recognition led to a grandma being wrongly jailed

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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.

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Take to the skies with nearly half off the DJI Neo Fly More Combo

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SAVE $90: As of April 22, get the DJI Neo Fly More Combo for $259 at Amazon, down from its usual price of $349 with an on-page coupon. That's a discount of 26%.



DJI Neo Fly More Combo on white background

Credit: Amazon

$259
at Amazon

$349
Save $90

Clip on-page coupon

Whether you're looking to get into flying drones or just want to add another to your collection, DJI is the brand to shop. Despite news of DJI drones being banned in the United States, there are still ways to get around the ban if you look hard enough. You can still keep the drones you own, and you can still shop those on sale at retailers like Amazon. And we've got one that you can snap up right now for an excellent price.

As of April 22, get the DJI Neo Fly More Combo for $259 at Amazon, down from its usual price of $349 with an on-page coupon. That's $90 off and a discount of 26%.

This bundle includes the DJI Neo drone, a remote controller, RC cable, flight battery, two-way charging hub, propeller guards, spare propellers, spare propeller screws, a screwdriver, gimbal protector, and a Type-C to Type-C cable.

The DJI Neo Fly More Combo is a lightweight and simple to fly option for users of any skill level. It's lighter than your phone, in fact, and small enough that you don't need to register with the FAA to fly it. You can use your phone to operate it, and it can take off from your hand with a single button push, so it's already simple to use right out of the box.

You can just fly the drone around, or you can take photos from a bird's eye point of view with smart subject tracking and quickshots that your drone can take all on its own. You can also control it via voice or RC depending on your preference.

With 4K ultra stabilized video, you can also stack plenty of crisp, high definition video while flying, all without complex setups that confuse and potentially frustrate.

if you're ready to get into drone photography or just want a chance to fly one without breaking the bank, this combo is well worth splurging on.

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Google Wallet now lets you track flights from your lock screen. How to try it.

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Google just made life a tiny bit easier for Android users who love to travel.

9to5google spotted a new lock screen widget for Android 16 that gives you persistent progress updates on your flights. It's very simple and straightforward: It shows your departing airport, your destination airport, your estimated arrival time, and a progress bar measuring how deep into the flight you are.

As 9to5google noted, this is on top of some already-existing features for travelers who add their boarding passes to the Google Wallet app. Those include push notifications about flight changes, but the flight progress widget is brand-new, having been promised by Google last year.

If you want to try it, well, you'd better have a flight lined up first. Add the boarding pass to Google Wallet, and the widget should appear shortly before takeoff. In other words, you don't really have to do anything other than put your boarding pass in your phone.

This marks another step forward for Google Wallet, which replaced Google Pay in 2024 as the go-to destination for credit cards and other important kinds of digital documentation on Android devices. By all accounts, it's been a successful transition for Android users, and if Google keeps adding neat little conveniences like this flight tracker widget, it'll only get better.

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Meta will track employee mouse movements and keystrokes for AI training, report says

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Meta is about to ramp up surveillance of its employees, Reuters reports, but in a very 2026 twist, it's not meant to catch people slacking off.

Reuters reports that Meta is installing tracking software that can capture mouse movements and keystrokes on U.S.-based employees' computers. While this sort of surveillance isn't unheard of in corporate America, the motivation here is slightly novel: Meta is reportedly going to use the data to train AI agents, per a company memo seen by Reuters.

This will be done through a tool called Model Capability Initiative, or MCI.

Meta's memo said the idea is to help AI agents improve at tasks they currently struggle with, such as using keyboard shortcuts. And in a different memo reportedly sent to employees on Monday, CTO Andrew Bosworth said to expect more internal data collection in order to make agents better at replicating human work. The goal, per Bosworth, is for agents to do most of the work while humans sit back and monitor the situation.

“The vision we are building towards is ​one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve," Bosworth said, per Reuters.

While Meta did not explicitly say any of this was meant to replace human workers down the line, it's reasonable to wonder if that's where this is eventually going. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs because of AI last year, and Meta has already laid off a quadruple-digit number of people (though those were unrelated to AI) earlier this year, with more cuts coming later in May.

If, at some point in the future, Meta reduces its workforce with the aim of having AI agents do the work instead, it may have been those same Meta employees who trained the AI in the first place.

In the meantime, Reuters reports that Meta assured employees that the data will not be used in performance reviews.

Meta hasn't had a great year, privacy-wise, and we're only four months into 2026.

In March, the company was accused of sending Meta Ray-Ban user recordings, including intimate images, to offshore Meta workers, also for AI training. Earlier this month, we reported on the case of a former Meta employee under criminal investigation for downloading private Facebook photos. And after a report that Meta was planning to add facial recognition technology into its smart glasses, a group of 70 organizations, including the ACLU, signed a public letter urging Meta to reverse course.

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