Verkada Emplyees Abuse Access to Company’s Facial Recognition System

Verkada Emplyees Abuse Access to Company’s Facial Recognition System
Short Title	Verkada Emplyees Abuse Access to Company’s Facial Recognition System to Harass Female Coworkers
Location	United States
Date	October 2020
Solove Harm	Identification, Exclusion, Secondary Use
Information	Physical Characteristics, Identifying
Threat Actors	Verkada, Verkada employees, Verkada facial recognition software
Individuals
Affected	Verkada employees
High Risk Groups	Females
Tangible Harms

Employees at Verkada abused access to the company's facial recognition system to copy photos of women colleagues into a slack chat and make sexually explicit jokes.

Description

Verkada is a fast growing Silicon Valley startup that sells machine vision security cameras with cloud-software.

In 2019 a sales director on the company's sales team abused their access to these cameras to take and post photos of colleagues in a Slack channel, where they made sexually explicit jokes about women who worked at the company.^Exclusion

Comments were posted along with a series of photos of employees’ faces captured with the office's Surveillance system which were patched together using a Verkada facial recognition feature. The feature is called “Face search” and it can pinpoint an individual in a sea of faces. ^{Identification} Verkada software allows users to immediately detect all footage of a particular person of interest, rather than forcing people reviewing the tape to search through hours of video.

According to three sources who worked at Verkada at the time, the group of men posted sexually graphic content about multiple female employees in similar Slack messages. such abuse of access to the facial recognition system is an example of Secondary Use.

Breakdown

Threat: Verkada monitoring its employees through the cameras in the office
At-Risk group: Verkada employees
Harm: Surveillance
Secondary Consequences: not known

Threat: Verkada employees accessing facial recognition system to take photos of female colleagues and harass them in a Slack chat instead of accessing it for work purposes
At-Risk group: Verkada female employees
Harm: Secondary Use
Secondary Consequences: Potentially: Embarrassment

Threat: Verkada software pipointing a person by combining their image with other images it has of them
At-Risk group: People on Verkada cameras footages
Harm: Identification
Secondary Consequences: not known

Threat: Verkada employees posting images of their female colleagues in a chat, harassing them and laughing about them being their backs
At-Risk group: Verkada female employees
Harm: Exclusion
Secondary Consequences: Potentially: Embarrassment

Sources

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdyqm/surveillance-startup-used-own-cameras-to-harass-coworkers