And, even if there were, making promises about one state does nothing to end Clearview’s abusive exploitation of people’s faceprints across the country,” Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in a statement given to The Verge. There is no guarantee these steps will actually protect Illinois residents. “These promises do little to address concerns about Clearview’s reckless and dangerous business model. Clearview’s database, which is provided to customers via an app and a website, already contains more than 3 billion photos collected in part by scraping social media sites against those services’ terms of service. It’s also unclear if any of these measures will be successful at preventing future privacy violations or dispelling the controversy around Clearview’s controversial approach to data collection, its sale of potential privacy-violating technology to law enforcement, and the lack of regulatory oversight governing how the company operates. The company says it’s also building an opt-out tool, but it’s not clear if that would be at the request of an Illinois-based individual and what exactly the process would involve.Ĭlearview AI has been mired in controversy over its scraping of social media sites “It is committed to abiding by all laws applicable to it.”Ĭlearview says in addition to ending its contracts, it will also take measures to prevent its technology from collecting data from Illinois residents by banning photos containing metadata that indicate the photo was taken in the state and banning URLs and Illinois-based IP addresses from its automated systems for collecting new data. “Clearview AI continues to pursue its core mission: to assist law enforcement agencies around the nation in identifying perpetrators and victims of crime, including horrific crimes such as trafficking and child abuse,” Lee Wolosky, the lawyer representing Clearview AI in the case, told BuzzFeed. It’s not clear if the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Chicago office or the Illinois division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, both of which have reportedly used Clearview’s database in the past, will now be prevented from using the platform under the outright Illinois ban. A majority of those customers are law enforcement, BuzzFeed reports. The law is the same one under which Facebook settled a class-action lawsuit earlier this year for $550 million over its use of facial recognition technology to identify, without consent, the faces of people in photos uploaded to its social network.Īccording to BuzzFeed, Clearview has had at least 105 customers in Illinois, ranging from the Chicago Police Department to the office of the Illinois Secretary of State. The plaintiff in the lawsuit, David Mutnick, sued Clearview in January for violating his and other state residents’ privacy under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), a rare and far-reaching piece of facial recognition-related legislation that makes it illegal for companies to collect and store sensitive biometric data without consent. “Clearview is also cancelling all accounts belonging to any entity based in Illinois.” Clearview argues that it should not face an injunction, which would prohibit it from using current or past Illinois residents’ biometric data, because it’s taking these steps to comply with the state’s privacy law. “Clearview is cancelling the accounts of every customer who was not either associated with law enforcement or some other federal, state, or local government department, office, or agency,” Clearview’s filing reads. The technology is used for after-the-crime investigations by law enforcement.“Clearview is also cancelling all accounts belonging to any entity based in Illinois.” "Law enforcement agencies continue to evolve and adopt new technology by necessity, and Clearview’s revolutionary image search and identification capabilities have proven to be a game-changer in bringing unidentified criminals to justice," said Hoan Ton-That, Co-Founder and CEO of Clearview AI.Ĭlearview’s proprietary image-search technology enables law enforcement to accurately, reliably and lawfully identify criminal suspects, as well as the victims upon whom they prey, by matching within seconds a single, unidentified photograph with publicly available, open-sourced images from the Internet. The investment, which includes funds from institutional investors and family offices, will fuel Clearview’s continued growth.
Clearview ai stock series#
NEW YORK, July 26, 2021-( BUSINESS WIRE)- Clearview AI, the leading facial recognition company that provides powerful and reliable photo identification technology to law enforcement agencies, announced the successful close of a $30 million Series B funding round that now values the company at $130 million.
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