Clearview AI

Clearview AI is a provider of facial-recognition research tools (upgraded version named Clearview 2.0 released in March 2022) for law enforcement to identify both perpetrators and victims. As of March 2022, the company had entered into contracts with over 3,100 police agencies in the US. In March 2023 it was reported that its tool had been used over a million times by the US police. In February 2021, a patent filed by the company in August 2019 became public, which describes how the technology can be used by the private sector in addition to law enforcement agencies. The patent describes the private use of the software for individuals to obtain more information on people they meet through business, dating, and other relationships by using facial recognition. In January 2022, the company received a patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for its ability to gather images and information publicly available on the internet and match it with similar photos to identify individuals. However, in an interview, the company’s CEO Hoan Ton-That has iterated that the software is only used for law enforcement at present and that the company had no plans to launch a version targeting private customers. However, despite the company’s claims that it only works with law enforcement agencies, a customer list leaked in February 2020 revealed the names of private companies such as Walmart and Macy’s.

The company claims to have a database of more than 30 billion images (as of March 2023) said to be scraped from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Over January and February 2020, these companies demanded that Clearview AI stop scraping data from their websites. Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That stated it only collects publicly available images and is protected by the US Constitution’s First Amendment. The consequences of these claims are yet to be determined. In its last fundraising round in July 2021, the company raised USD 30 million—including a previously disclosed USD 8.6 million from September 2020—from undisclosed investors. This round brought the company’s total funding to USD 38 million, valuing Clearview AI at USD 130 million.

Given the claims mentioned above concerning working with private companies and using scraped data, the company has stopped operations in several regions within the US, Canada, Australia, Italy, and the UK over violations of privacy laws in relation to collecting photos of citizens without their knowledge or permission. In December 2021, three Canadian provincial privacy protection authorities ordered Clearview AI to stop collecting citizens’ personal information and to delete already collected information, while the French data protection agency Commission Nationale Informatique & Libertes (CNIL) notified Clearview AI to stop processing French citizens’ personal data and to delete existing data within two months. That said, the company, which has operations in more than 25 countries, continues to expand. For example, the company has signed a USD 500,000 contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal law enforcement agency under the US Department of Homeland Security, a USD 18,000 contract with the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), and a USD 50,000 contract with the US Air Force in 2021. Furthermore, with the aim of strengthening its product, in October 2020, the company announced its plans to introduce new compliance features to prevent abuse and enforce usage rules for law enforcement officers. The company also introduced several features in October 2021, to deblur photos and to depict the full faces of people wearing masks. In November 2021 the company announced that it had achieved number one status in the US in one-to-one facial verification, one-to-many facial verification, and wild photos categories in the facial recognition vendor test (FRVT), conducted by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In April 2022, the company also disclosed plans to launch facial recognition for commercial use, targeting banks and private businesses.