Clearview AI
In plain wordsA US company that collected billions of photos from the internet without permission to build a face-search tool for police, the best-known example of controversial facial recognition.
A US facial recognitionfacial recognition, n.: Technology that identifies or checks who someone is by comparing a picture of their face with stored photos, used by phones, passport gates and police databases. company whose search engine matches an uploaded photo of a face against a database built by scrapingweb scraping, n.: Using software to automatically copy information from websites — text, prices, images — in bulk, which is how much of the data used to train AI was gathered. publicly accessible images from social media and other websites without the consent of the people pictured; the company has described the database as holding tens of billions of images. Its main customers are law-enforcement agencies. Its practices became a landmark case for biometric privacy: data-protection regulators in several European countries, Canada and Australia found it in breach of the law, with fines including €20 million each from the Italian, Greek and French authorities (2022) and €30.5 million from the Dutch authority (2024), and a 2022 US settlement under Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act barred it from selling database access to most private companies nationwide. The EU AI ActEU AI Act, prop. n.: The European Union's law on artificial intelligence, the first broad AI law anywhere: it bans some uses, sets strict checks for risky ones and puts duties on the makers of the biggest AI models. now prohibits untargeted scraping of facial images to build or expand such databases.
Our procurement rules now ask whether a vendor's face gallery was built the Clearview AI way, by scraping.
Origin
Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz started the company in 2017; it attracted little notice until Kashmir Hill's New York Times investigation 'The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It' (January 2020).
Related
- facial recognitionfacial recognition, n.: Technology that identifies or checks who someone is by comparing a picture of their face with stored photos, used by phones, passport gates and police databases.
- AI surveillanceAI surveillance, n.: Using AI to watch, identify, track or profile people on a scale no team of humans could manage, for example by scanning camera feeds or analyzing phone and online data.
- remote biometric identificationremote biometric identification, n.: Using AI to recognize people at a distance — usually by matching faces in camera footage against a database — without their taking part. The EU strictly limits live police use of it in public places.
- prohibited AI practicesprohibited AI practices, n.: Uses of AI that the EU bans outright as too harmful — such as manipulating people, social scoring, and most live facial recognition by police in public places.
- web scrapingweb scraping, n.: Using software to automatically copy information from websites — text, prices, images — in bulk, which is how much of the data used to train AI was gathered.
Sources
- Hill, K. (2020). The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It. The New York Times, 18 January 2020.
- Hill, K. (2023). Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It. Random House.