The company Clearview AI can match a person’s photo to the billions of images currently exposed on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Venmo, as well as most other sites that have a cache of facial images. An article in Engadget reports that Twitter, Google and YouTube have sent cease-and-desist letters to Clearview AI.
In response, Clearview AI claims these requests infringe on the company’s First Amendment rights. While I doubt anyone would be looking for me, this provides criminals and law enforcement a mechanism to find anyone, in anyplace. Today senior executives of large companies often use security tactics that include hiding where they live. If a small business owner can be easily traced, will criminals start looking for softer targets?
Here’s more from the Engadget article:
“Following Twitter, Google and YouTube have become the latest companies to send a cease-and-desist letter to Clearview AI, the startup behind a controversial facial recognition program that more than 600 police departments across North American use. Clearview came under scrutiny earlier this year when The New York Times showed that the company had been scraping billions of images on the internet to build its database of faces. Google has demanded Clearview stop scraping YouTube videos for its database, as well as delete any photos it has already collected.
In an interview with CBS This Morning, the company’s CEO, Hoan Ton-That, said Clearview plans to challenge the cease-and-desist letters in court. Ton-That compared Clearview’s practice of scraping the internet for images to what Google does with its search engine. “Google can pull in information from all different websites,” he said. “So if it’s public, you know, and it’s out there, it could be inside Google search engine, it can be inside ours as well.” He then went on to argue the company has a First Amendment right to public information.”
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group