Veritone’s "Track" Technology Kills Your Anonymity

Article the Tenth of "The Second Bill of Rights" Solves That

Article the Tenth of The Second Bill of Rights adds real teeth to the Fourth Amendment in our digital dystopia of today and even moreso in the very near future. SHARE the SBOR website with your social media networks today!

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How a new type of AI is helping police skirt facial recognition bans (Read the article for context if you need it. This is not good news. Sorry.)

Police bans on automated facial recognition were supposed to slow the spread of machine‑speed tracking, yet Veritone’s “Track” platform shows how easy it is for law‑enforcement to route around those guardrails. Instead of matching faces, the software builds a profile from whatever the camera can see—height, build, gait, hair style, clothing, backpack, even the shape of a hat—and then follows that signature across hours of footage drawn from CCTVs, drones, body cams, Ring doorbells, or scraped YouTube clips. Four hundred public‑sector customers already use the tool, and the Department of Justice quietly adopted it last August. Veritone’s chief executive officer, Ryan S. Steelberg, is blunt about the business logic: “If we’re not allowed to track people’s faces, how do we help identify them anyway?”

Because Track never produces a numerical faceprint, most state and city statutes that prohibit “biometric surveillance” simply do not apply. That loophole is enormous. A detective can now type “adult male, 6′ 1″–6′ 4″, red hoodie, black backpack” and watch the system stitch together a minute‑by‑minute timeline as the target moves from a subway platform to a protest march to a ride‑share drop‑off. Veritone says live‑video support is less than a year away; the company is already marketing cloud access through Amazon and Microsoft for almost friction‑free deployment.

Civil‑liberties lawyers are alarmed for good reason. The ACLU calls this the first large‑scale non‑biometric tracking system in the United States and warns that it “creates a categorically new scale and nature of privacy invasion.” By divorcing the search from immutable traits, the software can monitor people precisely when their identities are most vulnerable—faces obscured by masks, surveillance‑camera angles too low for facial recognition, winter scenes where only coats and boots are visible. In effect, everything you wear or carry becomes an unregulated personal locator beacon.

The constitutional problem is familiar even if the technology is novel. Under Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court held that warrantless cell‑site history violates a “reasonable expectation of privacy” because it reveals the “privacies of life.” Attribute tracking goes further: it reconstructs a person’s movements without any judicial oversight and does so in real time, making every camera a digital checkpoint. That power is functionally indistinguishable from a general warrant—the very practice the Fourth Amendment was written to forbid.

Proponents claim Track is just a faster way to review evidence that was always available. The claim misses the point. Human investigators cannot monitor thousands of lenses simultaneously, cross‑index the footage, and rewind a week in minutes; an AI pipeline can. Scale transforms legality. What was once an impractical dragnet becomes routine police work, and the deterrent value of anonymity in public spaces disappears. When citizens know they are permanently traceable, they behave differently—think twice before attending a rally, meeting a journalist, or even visiting a clinic. The chilling effect on First‑Amendment activity is immediate and severe.

Patchwork local bans will not hold the line. Track is already in California cities that outlaw live facial recognition, and federal agencies can request searches irrespective of local rules. As each new attribute gets added—voice tone, shoe tread, thermal signature—the analytical distinction between biometric and non‑biometric blurs into meaninglessness, yet the legal distinction remains exploitable. The result is a surveillance architecture that grows in capability while sidestepping the very laws meant to restrain it.

This is exactly the scenario Article the Tenth of The Second Bill of Rights is designed to stop. The amendment would etch into constitutional stone two essential limits:

1. A right to practical anonymity FROM government observation unless probable cause and a specific warrant exist.

2. A right to be forgotten—the mandatory, verifiable deletion of personal data once an investigation ends or absent ongoing judicial supervision.

Without such bright‑line provisions, every technological advance will be marshalled to erode the Fourth Amendment’s spirit while lawyers argue over its letter. Track shows how little friction that path now faces. If we fail to act, the next version will not merely help police find a suspect; it will give government the continuous, cradle‑to‑grave dossier the Framers explicitly sought to prevent.

Enshrining Article the Tenth is no longer a theoretical exercise in constitutional craftsmanship; it is an urgent firewall against the arrival of yet more ubiquitous, unaccountable state surveillance.

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