A hot potato: AI has helped police forces across the US in recent years, for better and for worse. The latest use of the technology allows law enforcement to enter an interior photo of a home and have the AI determine the location, although there are some limitations.
The tool, called Raven, is used by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office (MDSO), 404 Media reports. Raven was made by a company called Graylark Technologies and was called GeoSpy before its new home identification features were added.
The limitation is that Raven can’t easily identify every house in the world from an interior photo. His abilities seem to be limited to certain characteristics. Graylark CEO Daniel Heinen demonstrated its power in a LinkedIn post, showing how to perform a regional search on something as simple as a photo of a washer and dryer.
While Heinen doesn’t mention it in the post, 404 Media confirmed that the language generated in the results directly references listings on Airbnb and short-term rental website Vrbo.
Please note that this is not a simple reverse image search. Raven selects distinctive details in a photo and uses them to find likely matches to the same property on sites like Airbnb, even if the images are different.
Heinen wrote that short-term rentals can be used as places for human trafficking and exploitation, making Raven a useful tool for police. “For investigators working human trafficking and exploitation cases, this connection can turn an unfamiliar space into a location lead they can review and track,” he wrote.
Another demonstration video suggested that Raven pulled photo data from real estate marketplace Zillow.
GeoSpy was trained on millions of images from around the world and is designed to identify unique geographic markers such as architecture and soil. Raven extends this ability to buildings.
As with pretty much any use of AI for law enforcement purposes, Raven raises questions about privacy. Airbnb said it has technical safeguards in place to limit automated data collection on its website and is reviewing the case. Zillow said data scraping violates its terms of service, adding that it will pursue legal action if necessary. Vrbo did not respond to questions for comment.
Police use of AI-powered surveillance technology like Flock has led to significant backlash against the companies behind these systems.
Another similarity between Flock and Raven is that some people on the company’s Discord server asked for help stalking women when the latter was first introduced as GeoSpy and made generally available to the public. Graylark then restricted the tool to corporate and government users. Dozens of police officers have since been accused of using Flock and other license plate readers to track women.
