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AI Businesses Privacy

Face Scanner Clearview AI Aims To Branch Out Beyond Police (apnews.com) 11

A controversial facial recognition company that's built a massive photographic dossier of the world's people for use by police, national governments and -- most recently -- the Ukrainian military is now planning to offer its technology to banks and other private businesses. The Washington Post reports: Clearview AI co-founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That disclosed the plans Friday to The Associated Press in order to clarify a recent federal court filing that suggested the company was up for sale. "We don't have any plans to sell the company," he said. Instead, he said the New York startup is looking to launch a new business venture to compete with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft in verifying people's identity using facial recognition.

The new "consent-based" product would use Clearview's algorithms to verify a person's face, but would not involve its ever-growing trove of some 20 billion images, which Ton-That said is reserved for law enforcement use. Such ID checks that can be used to validate bank transactions or for other commercial purposes are the "least controversial use case" of facial recognition, he said. That's in contrast to the business practice for which Clearview is best known: collecting a huge trove of images posted on Facebook, YouTube and just about anywhere else on the publicly-accessible internet.

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Face Scanner Clearview AI Aims To Branch Out Beyond Police

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    It used to be that science fiction led reality by at least 50-100 years. Now folks like Mr. Ton-Twat can create a dystopian business that's so compressed in time that it leads by a mere decade or two.

    Time to brush up on some recent science fiction to see what hellscape awaits us all next year.

  • Massive privacy breach in plain sight. Minors cannot give their permission, and facial point signatures may still be used after he/she turns 16. I doubt European citizens pictures are stored in the EU. Follow a politician around, and enter the pictures of everyone he talks to. Then add to a dirt file, for later release. Mandate every photo HAS to have its metadata attached and inheritance chain intact with collection source, and the owner the right to sue the person or entity for illegal transfer, just like
  • by Anonymous Coward

    This is one of those technologies that I just don't want, because I don't want to live in the world it helps create.

    It does underscore we need better privacy laws, world-wide.

  • by kmoser ( 1469707 ) on Friday April 01, 2022 @10:38PM (#62410092)
    Having law enforcement base their intel on information uploaded to the Internet? What could possibly go wrong?
  • by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Friday April 01, 2022 @11:29PM (#62410128)

    Privacy Rapist Clearview AI Aims To Branch Out Beyond Police

    There FTFY.

  • The sooner that you can purchase this information as a private citizen the sooner people will start to care more about privacy. If the price is set low enough, tons of people would use it for seemingly mundane things, and it will come to the attention of legislators who will finally have to do something instead of ignoring the problem. #becausedonations

    Years ago, there was a service where you could run a name search and put in some geographic limitations and get a list of people. The basic search cost $.25

  • Are Clearview trying to out-China China, i.e. create a horrific surveillance state dystopia where false positives & an impenetrable, unaccountable bureaucratic system leaves its innocent victims denied participation in society? I hope the EU steps in with some meaningful, effective prosecutions on this. Who's up for filing GDPR privacy requests in handwritten letters for them to process en masse? Could be fun - when's the last time you wrote & mailed an actual letter?
  • A number of countries have banned the use of Clearview AI for privacy breaches. That will make using it much more iffy - obviously companies within those countries can't use it, but companies outside those countries might have issues, especially if there are divisions of that company within those countries as well.

    Plus, all those countries have basically said the photos of people within must be deleted. So now a company outside could run into legal trouble for having access to material they shouldn't have i

  • matching faces of exploited kids to identify a lead or using at a gas station to find a missing kids seems like good use of face matching technology
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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