The Israeli Face Recognition Company Surveilling the World

Most of you have probably never heard of Corsight AI. That’s by design. But dig into any new dystopian facial recognition deployment, and you’ll find their name buried in there somewhere. So let’s talk about who they actually are.

Founded in 2019, Corsight describes itself as the creator of an “industry-leading face intelligence technology.” The company says its system is powered by “Autonomous AI,” which it bills as “the most advanced artificial intelligence system developed by top AI researchers and backed by more than 250 patents.”

On its landing page, Corsight hides behind the idea of safety. It’s a cheap, reliable strategy employed by almost every surveillance company. Nobody argues against safety…

“Critical information often goes unnoticed in standard video footage, endangering visitors and staff. Our facial intelligence technology empowers security teams to act decisively. Identify individuals on watchlists. Flag unauthorized access to restricted areas. Detect patterns of shoplifting, burglary and fraud.”

Sure. But helping stop shoplifters is a long way from what this technology is currently doing in Palestine.

The Israeli Connection Nobody Wants To Talk About

Human rights organizations have been sounding the alarm for months: the United Kingdom is quietly expanding its use of live facial recognition, embedding it into police operations across the country with very little public oversight and even less accountability.

The system British police chose is built by Corsight, an Israeli company whose facial recognition technology has reportedly already been put to work by the IDF. According to the research group Who Profits, soldiers used Corsight’s program to scan, document, and detain civilians moving through checkpoints and along major roads in Palestine.

This is not a fringe claim. In January 2026, Al Jazeera also reported that the UK’s rollout would rely on software already used in Palestine to track civilians. A follow-up investigation went further, revealing that Corsight had been selected by the Home Office through a subcontract with UK firm Digital Barriers to expand Britain’s fleet of facial recognition vans.

The watchdog group Action on Armed Violence has been documenting this for over a year, revealing that Essex Police deployed Corsight-linked technology while refusing to confirm it had met with the company, calling it “factually incorrect” to suggest that it was doing business with an Israeli firm. Parse that sentence carefully. They didn’t say it wasn’t true. They said the framing was incorrect.

An in-depth New York Times investigation revealed that Corsight’s system repeatedly misidentified civilians as having ties to Hamas, leading to wrongful arrests and interrogations.

So the question isn’t really whether this is “just about stopping shoplifters.” The question is why the British police, along with police forces in many other countries, deployed the same system that’s used to process people at military checkpoints during an ongoing genocide.

Sold to Stores, Not Just Soldiers

Corsight doesn’t only pitch itself to militaries and governments. It sells the same surveillance infrastructure to private businesses, just repackaged in the warm language of retail:

• A better shopping experience. Offer tailored shopping by highlighting your loyal, repeat customers.
• Loss prevention. Detect and stop returning and new shoplifters, along with organized retail crime, cutting losses and protecting profits.
• Security. Identify potential threats and improve overall store safety.

Read that first bullet again. “A better shopping experience” means the store knows your face the moment you walk through the door. According to Corsight and its customers, the comfort should be built into the cage…

A Map of the Watchers: Country by Country

Corsight works with law enforcement and commercial clients all over the world. The UK, US, and Canada are just the start. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that this Israeli company’s list of commercial partners is genuinely staggering given their history.

The investigative project Surveillance Watch keeps a running map of where these systems land, and the entries pile up fast.

Australia. Corsight announced a partnership with AusComply that, in a single year, signed up more than a dozen clubs and pubs, including two well-known Sydney venues, the ArtHouse Hotel and the Gregory Hills Hotel.

Canada. Edmonton police documents, obtained and reported on by CBC News, shed light on what was billed as Canada’s first AI facial recognition bodycam pilot.

Brazil. The company also announced a partnership with the public school system of Alagoas, a state in Brazil’s northeast, to put its facial recognition technology into schools.

Paraguay. Corsight locked in a facial intelligence licensing deal with a large business conglomerate to cement its presence there.

The Philippines. Corsight is rolling out its facial recognition software to retailers through a new partnership with Roxas Management Consultancy of the RXS Meta group. The Israeli company’s pitch includes catching shoplifters through watchlists, cutting theft through access control, and flagging “suspicious patterns and behaviors” through AI vision analytics.

That phrase, “suspicious behaviors,” is exactly where we ought to stop and think. We’re talking about handing a piece of software the authority to decide what a person intends or is really doing.

Corsight’s activities in Colombia, India, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, and others that aren’t highlighted in this article show just how pervasive their technologies are.

The company continues to expand and has recently introduced more retail-focused features, including deeper “insights” into customer behavior. And so we loop around to the big question: why would we allow companies with pro-genocide directors to watch over our shopping centers?

Precrime Isn’t Science Fiction Anymore

Do we really want to live in cities where people have to worry about being wrongly flagged for a crime they didn’t commit? Or worse, singled out in advance as the “likely perpetrator” of future crimes because a foreign algorithm analyzed their facial expression, body language, or some other minute tell?

This isn’t paranoia. It’s already happening. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has documented the cases of Christopher Galtin and Jason Vernau, two men wrongly arrested in St. Louis and Miami, respectively, after the software targeted the wrong person. And these aren’t random glitches. The landmark 2019 NIST study found that face recognition algorithms were 10 to 100 times more likely to misidentify Black and East Asian faces than white ones. The technology promises sharper investigations. What it actually delivers is technical failure, baked-in racial bias, and a very real human cost.

Corsight is only one symptom of something much larger. If you want to see how the pieces fit together, journalist Whitney Webb lays it out in her conversation on precrime and the global panopticon. Webb carefully traces how digital IDs, private intelligence contractors, and AI-driven data systems are quietly being wired into a single surveillance grid.

Where This Is Headed

The control grid only continues to grow. Corsight’s technology is already being pushed into entertainment venues, banks, retail stores, critical infrastructure, casinos, and corporate security. Out in public, on streets, in transit hubs, in shopping centers, it tracks people’s movements in real time. Behind closed doors, in workplaces and residential complexes, it quietly builds a database of sensitive personal information that is only ever one breach or one abuse away from being turned against the people in it.

That is the real cost. Not “safety,” but the slow surrender of any control we still have over our faces, our movements, and our lives, in public and in private alike.

Take Your Face Back

If this piece made you want to do something about it, start simple. IR Eyewear makes Italian-designed, IR-blocking glasses that defeat facial recognition cameras without making you look like you’re hiding. Because you shouldn’t have to choose between your privacy and how you look.

Shop the full IR Eyewear collection and take your face back from the cameras.