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.
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.
Compression (Score:1)
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.
Time for Mandatory fines in other countries (Score:2)
It doesn't matter how you package it (Score:1)
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.
The Internet is always trustworthy (Score:3)
Title correction: (Score:3)
Privacy Rapist Clearview AI Aims To Branch Out Beyond Police
There FTFY.
It's about time (Score:2)
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
Trying to out-China China (Score:2)
Potentially risky... (Score:2)
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
exploited amd missing kids (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)