Or just a private firm[0], since models need training data and Facebook has a truly staggering amount, all pre-tagged. There is also a small amount of irony in the fact that Facebook's initial incarnations were pre-seeded with scraped data from Harvard student websites.

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0. For example: https://www.businessinsider.com/ntechlab-google-facial-recog...

So what about the American and Western companies whose accounts haven't been removed and are doing this too?

Social media monitoring is a big business worldwide, many of the largest have longstanding government contracts. Facial profiles for the people you are targeting is only an api call away.