![]() ![]() ![]() The fly in this soothing ointment is that the people whose images make up the database were not informed that their photographs were being collected or used in this way and they certainly never consented to their use in this way. Clearview describes its business as “building a secure world, one face at a time”. The app produces a list of images that have similar characteristics to those in the photo provided by the customer, together with a link to the websites whence those images came. The company uses this database to provide a service that allows customers to upload an image of a person to its app, which is then checked for a match against all the images in the database. It’s a US outfit that has “scraped” (ie digitally collected) more than 20bn images of people’s faces from publicly available information on the internet and social media platforms all over the world to create an online database. Since Clearview AI is not exactly a household name some background might be helpful. The ICO also issued an enforcement notice, ordering the company to stop obtaining and using the personal data of UK residents that is publicly available on the internet and to delete the data of UK residents from its systems. The team's efforts to rework Ton-That's original code, including by creating two custom database technologies, have lowered processing costs per face in Clearview's system by 95% since 2018, Ton-That said.Īs that closely tracked "cost per face" falls, Clearview can gather additional photos and become more likely to return a lead, he said.Last week, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) slapped a £7.5m fine on a smallish tech company called Clearview AI for “using images of people in the UK, and elsewhere, that were collected from the web and social media to create a global online database that could be used for facial recognition”. Other technical staff include a former Coinbase (COIN.O) employee who runs cybersecurity and an entrepreneur who sold his search engine to Clearview in 2019 and oversees data collection. "It was just something hard to pass on again," Liu said. He earlier had partnered with Ton-That to advance Clearview's prototype. The research head Liu formally joined last year after working as a senior software engineer at Bloomberg LP since 2017, he said. In turn, Clearview had greater accuracy than rival tools, according to a U.S. Clearview learns from 70 million online photos of all types of people, compared with smaller databases of celebrity pictures that power rival systems, Ton-That said.Ĭlearview uses AI to apply masks, glasses and other distortions to training images, enabling it to recognize faces when obscured, in profile, deep in the background or 20 years younger. Tuesday's patent filing covers Clearview's process for fast and lower-cost training of facial recognition. ![]() He replicated the results, gathered online photos and improved accuracy to 99% from 70%. Ton-That began developing facial recognition around 2015 after reading papers such as "DeepFace" and "FaceNet" published by scientists at Google, Facebook and top universities showing dramatic strides in the technology. “Clearview AI has a pattern of deception: the company has been publicly defending its mass surveillance by claiming it will only sell to law enforcement while privately pitching an expansion into finance, retail and entertainment," said Jack Poulson, executive director of tech accountability group Tech Inquiry. Clearview also has won about $50,000 to research augmented reality glasses with facial recognition to secure Air Force base checkpoints.Ĭritics are alarmed as Clearview weighs entering new industries. agencies that have used Clearview, a government audit found last August. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Fish and Wildlife Service are among a dozen U.S. No known startup has ventured into the same gray area as Clearview, which raised around $37 million from investors and wants more now. Giant companies such as Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O) and Meta Platform's (FB.O) Facebook with the data to develop competing tools have retreated from facial recognition, citing societal concerns and the need for clarity from regulators. Some lawmakers want it banned.ĭata protection authorities in at least four countries including Canada and France have said the photo collection broke privacy laws, and Clearview is battling lawsuits in the United States that could force it to change tactics. Though Clearview compares itself to Google Images search, detractors say it violates privacy norms and foreshadows more egregious surveillance. ![]()
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