#Face scanner clearview ai to branch for free#

He added at the time that if the company shifted to other uses, it would let the public and courts know about it. 'But when we gave this to law enforcement, we saw such amazing success right away where they could ID so many victims of crime or perpetrators of it that it was a kind of a no-brainer at that point to really focus on that kind of use case.” “We looked at all different kinds of use cases: building security, ID checks, even hotels, hospitality,' he said. “We’re really focused on law enforcement right now,” he said, describing how the company's mission had evolved from commercial applications into helping to solve crime. “We let the court know we’re exploring this idea,” he said Friday, noting the company's previous assertions that it was only selling its services to law enforcement.Īsked about future commercial applications during an interview with the AP in late February, Ton-That emphasized his company's ongoing focus on police work. Ton-That said the minutes incorrectly relayed what the company was trying to tell the judge about potentially expanding its business beyond law enforcement uses. Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act allows consumers to sue companies that don’t get permission before harvesting data such as faces and fingerprints. The minutes also said the “sale of Clearview’s app” would be discussed further once the company discloses more details to the plaintiffs. The official minutes from a March 17 hearing in a Chicago federal court said that Clearview AI was “considering selling the app platform to other entities,” citing one of the lawyers who's been defending the company in a case involving alleged violation of an Illinois digital privacy law. “They’ve been able to identify dead bodies, even with facial damage,” Ton-That said Friday.

#Face scanner clearview ai to branch for free#

Clearview in March also started offering its services for free to the Ukrainian military, in part to help identify dead Russian soldiers using Clearview’s repository of about 2 billion images scraped from Russian social media website VKontakte. Immigration and Customs Enforcement - particularly its investigative arm, which has used the technology to track down both the victims and perpetrators of child sexual exploitation. One of its biggest known federal contracts is with U.S. In the meantime, its growing database has helped Clearview's artificial intelligence technology learn and grow more accurate. lawmakers earlier this year warned that “Clearview AI’s technology could eliminate public anonymity in the United States.'ĭespite opposition from lawmakers, regulators, privacy advocates and the websites it scrapes for data, Clearview has continued to rack up new contracts with police departments and other government agencies. So have tech giants such as Google and Facebook. Regulators from Australia to Canada, France and Italy have taken measures to try to stop Clearview from pulling people's faces into its facial recognition engine without their consent. That's in contrast to the business practice for which Clearview is best known: collecting a huge trove of images posted on Facebook, YouTube and just about anywhere else on the publicly-accessible internet. Such ID checks that can be used to validate bank transactions or for other commercial purposes are the “least controversial use case” of facial recognition, he said. The new “consent-based” product would use Clearview's algorithms to verify a person's face, but would not involve its ever-growing trove of some 20 billion images, which Ton-That said is reserved for law enforcement use.