In 2019, Israeli media outlet Haaretz reported that the surveillance business provided its tools to Israeli military working to identify Palestinians at the West Bank border, after which Microsoft’s funding arm M12 pulled its shareholding. The company, which has raised $380 million funding since its 2015 founding from the likes of SoftBank and Qualcomm Ventures, started out life as AnyVision but ran into controversy because of its customers. Oosto, though, is hoping that it will be the top provider to this market of private entities wanting to make their surveillance slicker, not just in the U.S., but across the Atlantic, too. “As a baseline, facial recognition destroys privacy: The more it’s used, the easier it becomes to track people across public and private spaces.” “Selling facial recognition tech to private companies can actually increase the risk of police misusing the tech when companies sell or provide access to cops,” says Jake Wiener, a lawyer covering domestic surveillance at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). While companies see a way of automating their physical security, the privatization of tools that were once primarily used by intelligence and law enforcement agencies has privacy activists spooked.

It’s the kind of surveillance that’s now happening on private premises and public spaces all over America, as this powerful technology is placed not just in the hands of police and the federal government, but sold to private entities, too, whether they’re gambling establishments or retail outlets. The surveillance control room in the Tulsa casino shows faces being scanned by the Oosto technology.

Metal scanners in casinos