A controversial face recognition company that has produced a massive photographic dossier of the world’s people for use by police, national governments and – most recently – the Ukrainian military – now plans to offer its technology to banks and other private businesses.
Clearview AI Co-founder and CEO Hon Ton-That disclosed the plans to the Associated Press on Friday to clarify a recent federal court filing that suggested the company was up for sale.
“There are no plans to sell our company. Instead, he said New York is looking to launch a new business venture to compete with startup likes. heroine And Microsoft In verifying the identity of people using facial recognition.
The new “consent-based” product will use Clearview’s algorithms to verify a person’s face, but it will not include the growing trove of nearly 20 billion images that Ton-That said law enforcement uses. reserved for. Such ID checks that can be used for bank transactions or other commercial purposes are the “least controversial use case” of facial recognition, he said.
This is in contrast to the business practice for which Clearview is best known: collecting a vast collection of images posted on Facebook, youtube and almost anywhere on the publicly accessible Internet.
Regulators from Australia to Canada, France and Italy have taken measures to prevent Clearview from pulling people into their facial recognition engines without their consent. so are tech giants like Google And Facebook, Earlier this year a group of US lawmakers warned that “Clearview AI’s technology could eliminate public anonymity in the United States.”
Despite protests from lawmakers, regulators, privacy advocates and websites being scrapped for data, Clearview continues to strike new contracts with police departments and other government agencies. Meanwhile, its growing database has helped Clearview’s artificial intelligence technology to learn and grow more precisely.
One of its largest known federal contracts is with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—particularly its investigative arm, which has used the technology to track down both victims and perpetrators of child sexual abuse. In March Clearview began offering its services to the Ukrainian military for free, partly to help identify dead Russian soldiers using Clearview’s repository of nearly 2 billion images scraped from the Russian social media website VKontakte. For.
“They are able to identify bodies even with facial damage,” Ton-That said Friday.
Official minutes of a March 17 hearing in a Chicago federal court said that Clearview AI was “considering selling the app platform to other entities,” citing an attorney who has been involved in a case involving alleged breaches of Illinois digital privacy. I am defending the company. Law.
The minutes also said the “sale of Clearview’s app” would be discussed further after the company disclosed more details to the plaintiffs. Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act allows consumers to sue companies that don’t get permission before harvesting data like facial and fingerprints.
Ton-That said the minutes incorrectly relayed what the company was trying to tell the judge about potentially expanding its business beyond law enforcement uses.
“We told the court that we are exploring the idea,” he said on Friday, noting the company’s previous claims that it was only selling its services to law enforcement.
When asked about future business applications during an interview with the AP in late February, Ton-That emphasized his company’s ongoing focus on police work.
“We’re really focused on law enforcement right now,” he said, describing how the company’s mission had evolved from commercial applications to helping solve crime.
“We looked at a variety of use cases: security, ID checks, even hotels, hospitality,” he said. “But when we gave it to law enforcement, we immediately saw such astonishing success, where they could identify so many victims. About the crime or its perpetrators that it took to really focus on that kind of use case. Didn’t have a kind mind at the time.”
He said at the time that if the company moved to other uses, it would let the public and the courts know about it. He downplayed what he described as “generous goals” outlined by Clearview for potential investors in a document reported to the Washington Post in February.
The Post said the company’s financial presentation from December proposed various potential business uses of Clearview technology, including monitoring “gig economy” workers or providing companies with “real-time alerts” if certain people are detected. is applied, and a face is claimed—the image database is growing so large that “almost everyone in the world will be recognizable.”
An attorney representing activists in California suing Clearview on privacy grounds said Friday that their clients are most concerned about the government’s use to track protesters and immigrants, but Clearview’s “unauthorized capture” and any use on the basis of “sale” may infringe privacy rights.
“The potential future uses for Clearview appear to be a moving target,” said Sejal Zota, legal director at Just Futures Law. “And the scale is terrible.”