

In February 2020, multiple sources reported that Clearview AI had experienced a data breach, exposing its list of customers.

Ton-That responded in an interview with Errol Barnett of CBS This Morning that there's a first amendment right to the information, results were 99.6% accurate, and they have 10 billion scraped images. On February 5 and 6, 2020, Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Venmo sent cease and desist letters as it is against their policies. Facebook has said they are reviewing the situation, and Venmo also stated it is against their policies. Īfter discovering Clearview AI was scraping images from their site, Twitter sent a cease-and-desist letter, insisting that they remove all images as it is against Twitter's policies. Law enforcement officers have stated that Clearview's facial recognition is far superior in identifying perpetrators from any angle than previously used technology.
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Numerous advocates called for a ban of the Clearview's software upon learning that 10 billion images had been collected from social media websites. It accelerated a global debate on the regulation of facial recognition technology by governments and law enforcement. It was reported that Ton-That and Schwartz met at the Manhattan Institute. The exposé also identified Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz as the company's founders with investors including Peter Thiel. Citing the article, over 40 tech and civil rights organizations including Color of Change, Council on American–Islamic Relations, Demand Progress, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Fight for the Future, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Media Alliance, National Center for Transgender Equality, National Hispanic Media Coalition, National LGBTQ Task Force, Project On Government Oversight, Restore the Fourth, Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, and the Woodhull Freedom Foundation sent a letter to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and four congressional committees, outlining their concerns with facial recognition and Clearview, asking the PCLOB to suspend the use of facial recognition. Ĭlearview operated in near secrecy until the release of The New York Times exposé titled "The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It" in January 2020. In 2021, Time magazine named Clearview AI as one of the 100 most influential companies of the year. A spokesperson for the company claimed its valuation to be more than $100 million. However, contrary to Clearview's claims that its service is sold only to law enforcement, a data breach in early 2020 revealed that numerous commercial organizations were on Clearview's customer list. Clearview sells access to its database to law enforcement agencies and has 3,100 active users including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security according to The Wall Street Journal. This was followed by similar actions by YouTube (via Google) and Facebook in February. In January 2020, Twitter sent a cease and desist letter and requested the deletion of all collected data. Multiple reports identified Clearview's association with far-right personas dating back to 2016, when the company claimed to sever ties with two employees. Founded by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, the company maintained a low profile until late 2019, when its usage by law enforcement was reported on. The company's algorithm matches faces to a database of more than three billion images indexed from the Internet, including social media applications. Clearview AI Software Clearview AI Search EngineĬlearview AI is an American facial recognition company, providing software to companies, law enforcement, universities, and individuals.
