Clearview AI, the company behind a widely-used and extremely powerful facial recognition technology has scraped 30 billion photos to train its AI algorithm.
The New York Times reports that the company devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than thirty billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.
And if that’s not enough, 3,100 US law enforcement agencies have used the database and apparently used that algorithm to perform nearly one million searches.
To put that 30 billion figure in perspective: as of last quarter last year, Facebook had roughly 2.94 billion active monthly users. So, even with bots taken into consideration, it’s safe to say that there are a lot of faces in that database, scraped without the explicit knowledge of Facebook users — and, as Facebook tells it, without permission by the social media giant, either. In fact, Facebook has already sent Clearview at least one cease-and-desist.
“Clearview AI’s actions invade people’s privacy,” a Meta spokesperson said, “which is why we banned their founder from our services and sent them a legal demand to stop accessing any data, photos, or videos from our services.”
The CEO of Clearview (35 year old Hoan Ton-That) stated that “Clearview AI’s database of publicly available images is lawfully collected, just like any other search engine like Google”. Clearview AI’s database is used for after-the-crime investigations by law enforcement and is not available to the general public.”
“Every photo in the dataset,” he continued, “is a potential clue that could save a life, provide justice to an innocent victim, prevent a wrongful identification, or exonerate an innocent person.”
As is to be expected, some see this ever-growing and largely unregulated surveillance tactic in a very different light. “Clearview is a total affront to peoples’ rights and police should not be able to use this tool,” Caitlin Seeley George, said a director of the digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future.
“Without laws stopping them,” George added, “police often use Clearview without their department’s knowledge or consent, so Clearview boasting about how many searches is the only form of ‘transparency’ we get into just how widespread the use of facial recognition actually is.”
Clearview AI defines its mission as simple and impactful: to drastically reduce crime, fraud and risk making our communities safer and commerce more secure. The question is, at what cost? Do we, as users of Facebook” have any say over how our family photos are taken and used without our permission? The jury is still out on that… So far, France has forced them to delete all pictures of French citizens and the UK has fined them $9.4 million for illegally creating a database of billions of images from social media and internet sites. In the US, only the state of Illinois and the ACLU have taken them to task and won a settlement restricting the company from selling its database to private entities.
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