The reasoning was, theoretically, to help businesses keep track of their workforces, Reuters reported at the time. Ī similar situation was litigated recently when LinkedIn sent a cease-and-desist to the startup hiQ, which sold data on people to their employers based on what hiQ could scrape from LinkedIn. HiQ used a similar argument in its CFAA case vs. “I have a First Amendment right to expose the private data of millions of people” sounds crazy, but it’s legally tenable. What exists instead is a patchwork of state laws, including those of Virginia, Illinois - under whose law Facebook recently lost a $500 million lawsuit over its photo tagging and facial identification features - and California, which just recently enacted the strongest law so far in the union.
In short, it’s long overdue to acknowledge that people can have legitimate privacy interests in publicly shared information.” A patchwork of lawsĪs of this writing, there are few, if any, federal statutes governing online privacy. “What’s required to properly govern Clearview AI and so much else is a thoroughgoing reexamination of what private and public mean that shifts the key debates in law, ethics, design, and even everyday expectations. “It’s not surprising that the CEO of Clearview AI is weaponizing the First Amendment to justify his company’s practice of scraping online photos of people’s faces without their consent,” said Evan Selinger, a professor of philosophy and technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “It’s within the realm of plausible argument, but Clearview is on shaky ground if they want to say ‘I have this data and I can do whatever I want with it.’” “We don’t have a binding answer to that,” Kugler told Digital Trends. But what happens to that data after you collect it is not necessarily protected. “There have been arguments that there is a First Amendment right to access publicly available information on the internet and scrape it,” said Matthew Kugler, associate professor at Northwestern University. What is clear is this technology isn’t going away, and these legal questions will need to sort themselves out somehow, and soon. Scholars say that is both true and not true. He told CBS News in an interview that, essentially, spilling the data of millions of people to the police is totally legal. Meanwhile, Clearview AI founder Hoan Ton-That has made a claim that it’s his First Amendment right to collect public photos and use them in the way he has. Twitter sent one in January, while Facebook is said to be reviewing Clearview’s practices.
No one seems to be able to figure out if what Clearview AI is doing is legal, a quandary that has exposed the messy patchwork of laws that allow exploitation of people’s personal data to profligate.Īs reported first by CNET, Google and YouTube recently sent cease-and-desist letters to Clearview - the controversial law enforcement facial recognition technology - over its scraping of their sites for people’s information. A search of someone's face will surface other photos of the same person with links to where they appear on the web, making it possible to identify them." - Kashmir Hill, N.Y. The bottom line: "Clearview AI, which claims a database of three billion photos of people gathered from sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Venmo, charges law enforcement organizations subscription fees to use its product. Go deeper: Federal watchdog calls for better tracking of facial recognition use
Clearview ai series#
Existing backers, via a $7 million Series A round, included Peter Thiel, Kirenaga Partners, Hal Lambert and Andrew Vigneault. Why it matters: Clearview AI says that new investors have asked not to be publicly identified, as they apparently lack the courage of their checkbooks. and Australia, and also is the subject of several class-action lawsuits. The company is under investigation for possible privacy violations in the U.K. Clearview AI, a New York-based provider of facial recognition tech to law enforcement, raised $30 million in Series B funding.