Cease-and-desist orders from Facebook, Google and YouTube, who deemed that Clearview’s scraping activities violated their terms and conditions.A legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).Complaints and class action lawsuits filed in Illinois, Vermont, New York and California.The vast majority of people whose images are collected into the search engine are unaware of this feature.Ĭlearview AI has variously attracted the ire of companies, privacy organisations and regulators over the last few years, including getting hit with: These biometric data are particularly sensitive, especially because they are linked to our physical identity (what we are) and enable us to identify ourselves in a unique way. a digital representation of a person’s physical characteristics (the face in this case). In order to do so, the company builds a “biometric template”, i.e. The company offers this service to law enforcement authorities in order to identify perpetrators or victims of crime.įacial recognition technology is used to query the search engine and find a person based on their photograph. ![]() Thanks to this collection, the company markets access to its image database in the form of a search engine in which a person can be searched using a photograph. Thus, the company has collected over 20 billion images worldwide. ![]() Images are also extracted from videos available online on all platforms. that can be viewed without logging in to an account). It collects all the photographs that are directly accessible on these networks (i.e. New York-based Clearview claims to have built “the largest known database of 3+ billion facial images.If you haven’t heard of this company before, here’s a very clear and concise recap from the French privacy regulator, CNIL ( Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés), which has very handily been publishing its findings and rulings in this long-running story in both French and English:Ĭlearview AI collects photographs from many websites, including social media. The complaints filed in France, Austria, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom say that the company’s method of documenting and collecting data - including images of faces it automatically extracts from public websites - violates European privacy laws. Privacy International (PI) and several other European privacy and digital rights organisations filed legal complaints against the controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI. AnyVision, an Israeli competitor, raised $235 million this month in a financing round led by SoftBank.Īlthough earlier this year Clearview was named to TIME’s inaugural list of The 100 Most Influential Companies, the company is currently under investigation for possible privacy violations in the UK and Australia, and also is the subject of several class-action lawsuits. It is not the only facial recognition start-up to catch investors’ attention. Prior investors include Peter Thiel and Naval Ravikant. In December 2019, Clearview secured $7 million in Series A funding from investment trusts, funds, and individual investors. Hoan Ton-That, the company’s chief executive, said they “include institutional investors and private family offices.” The investors, though undeterred by the lawsuits, did not want to be identified. ![]() “Law enforcement agencies continue to evolve and adopt new technology by necessity, and Clearview’s revolutionary image search and identification capabilities have proven to be a game-changer in bringing unidentified criminals to justice,” said Hoan Ton-That, Co-Founder and CEO of Clearview AI. The technology is used for after-the-crime investigations by law enforcement. ![]() Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that provides photo identification technology to law enforcement agencies, announced the successful close of a US$30 million Series B funding round that now values the company at $130 million.Ĭlearview’s proprietary image-search technology enables law enforcement to ‘accurately, reliably, and lawfully identify criminal suspects, as well as the victims upon whom they prey’, by matching a single, unidentified photograph with publicly available, open-sourced images from the Internet.
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