Electronic surveillance

Concerned about facial recognition AI? What about behavior recognition software?

A young woman picks up and compares juices in a store aisle. She’s 29. She spends 40 minutes on average shopping and likes orange juice. That’s not all: She usually spends 2,500 yen per visit to the store.

The Japanese startup Vaak’s software knows a lot about the woman in a white shirt.

Most importantly, it knows that there is only a 4 percent chance of her doing something such as shoplifting.

Vaak is one of a growing number of companies across the globe developing AI-powered surveillance technology that analyzes body language to judge whether someone is behaving in a suspicious manner. (The technology also has important applications for autonomous cars; those systems need to know, for instance, what the intent of someone standing on a street corner is.)

But many companies envision the products as a security tool. While nary a month goes by without some press account on a troubling aspect of facial recognition technology, there’s been far less attention paid to the type of artificial intelligence that Vaak is developing.