Siddharth Jawahar sat before a Senate subcommittee last spring and swore his company's facial recognition software did not retain images of ordinary Americans.
On Tuesday, a whistleblower filing obtained by reporters showed the system had been storing millions of faces for years, some tagged with names scraped from social media.
Jawahar's company, Veridian Labs, sells its software to more than 400 police departments and a growing number of school districts.
The pitch was simple: find missing children, catch violent criminals, keep campuses safe.
The filing describes an internal folder labeled "training residuals" holding roughly 14 million face images, including photos of people who were never charged with a crime.
Employees reportedly raised concerns twice and were told the data was "anonymized enough." It was not.
Here is the part that should stop you cold.
If you have ever walked into a Walmart, a casino, a concert venue, or a high school football game in the past five years, there is a decent chance your face ended up in a database you never consented to and cannot access.
It is a story about a country that has quietly outsourced its memory to private companies with no real oversight, then acted shocked when those companies behave like companies.
Congress held a hearing, issued a stern letter, and moved on to the next news cycle.
Meanwhile, Jawahar's firm just signed a new contract with a major airport authority.
His employees got a companywide email praising "resilience." We have built a society where lying under oath to lawmakers carries roughly the same consequence as a parking ticket, provided you have enough lawyers and a good product demo.
The people who pay the price are not senators or CEOs.
They are parents who find out their teenager's face was used to train a system that later misidentified someone else's kid.
Ask yourself a simpler question: do you know who has your face right now?
If the answer is no, you are not paranoid.
We talk constantly about the collapse of trust in institutions.
We rarely admit that the collapse is not a mystery.
It is a business model, and it is working exactly as designed.
Final Thoughts
Until lying to Congress costs more than a bad headline, expect more of the same.