“With a little oversight and transparency, people are finding this tech isn’t appropriate,” he says. Martinez, from Open the Government, adds that it’s vital that the federal and local governments continue to ask questions about this technology. “And I am deeply concerned that it is capable of fundamentally dismantling Americans’ expectation that they can move, assemble, or simply appear in public without being identified.” “Clearview’s product appears to pose particularly chilling privacy risks,” Markey writes. Markey sent Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That a letter on January 23, along with a list of questions he hoped to have the CEO answer. On January 24, New Jersey’s attorney general ordered the state’s law enforcement to stop using Clearview AI over concern about the company’s techniques. Some politicians are also sounding the alarm. We patched the flaw, and continue to work to strengthen our security.” Not everyone in government or tech is a fanįacebook, Twitter, and Google have already sent Clearview AI letters asking it to stop scraping the photos on their sites.

Tor Ekeland, an attorney for Clearview, told Fortune last week that “security is a top priority.” He adds: “Unfortunately, data breaches are part of life in the 21st century. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), says in a statement. “This is a company whose entire business model relies on collecting incredibly sensitive and personal information, and this breach is yet another sign that the potential benefits of Clearview’s technology do not outweigh the grave privacy risks it poses,” Sen. Why it mattersįreddy Martinez, a policy analyst at Open the Government, a non-partisan coalition that advocates for government transparency, first learned about Clearview AI last year while working with nonprofit news site MuckRock on a project about law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology. Additionally, police can build a profile about the suspects based on what is posted online about them. If police want to identify suspects in a fight, for example, they can feed images of those suspects’ faces into Clearview to get results showing any public photos of them, along with links to social network profiles or websites from where those photos originated. Here’s what you need to know about Clearview AI: How does Clearview AI work?Ĭlearview AI has a database of 3 billion public images scraped from social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube that customers can compare their images to. Clearview had listed the app under Apple’s Enterprise program, which is typically only for apps that are meant to be distributed to a workforce within one company. Then on Friday, Apple removed Clearview AI’s app from its app store after determining that Clearview had violated its policies. The company’s clients outside of law enforcement have included Walmart and the NBA. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the U.S. On Wednesday, Clearview AI confirmed to Fortune that hackers had stolen its entire client list, which BuzzFeed later reported included 2,200 law enforcement agencies, U.S.

Each one raises serious privacy concerns about facial recognition technology and its growing adoption. Over the past several weeks, the company has been the subject of a number of unflattering headlines.

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