#Clearview facial recognition trial

Though the company no longer provides systems for private use, it continues to proudly advertise its relationship with law enforcement and allows potential law enforcement clients to request a thirty-day free trial through its website. Founded in 2017, the company’s website touts its impressive search engine of over ten billion images “sourced from public-only web sources, including news media, mugshot websites, public social media, and other open websites.” According to documents obtained by Buzzfeed News, within Clearview AI’s first three years of operation it facilitated nearly 500,000 searches by 2,228 law enforcement agencies, companies, and institutions. This patent will include the company’s highly controversial “automated web crawler” which scraps publicly available images from the internet to be analyzed as a part of the facial recognition process.Ĭlearview AI is likely the most notorious facial recognition technology company on the market. As soon as the administrative fees are paid, Clearview AI will receive a patent which covers the company’s methods of providing information based on facial recognition. Less than one month after Facebook’s announcement, Politico reported that the facial recognition technology company Clearview AI had received a “notice of allowance” from the U.S. However, the battle over the development and application of facial recognition technology is far from over. All three companies cited concerns regarding misuse as the reason for their policy changes. In June 2020, IBM announced that it would no longer offer facial recognition products, a decision which was quickly followed by statements from Amazon and Microsoft that they would place moratoriums on law enforcement access to their facial recognition programs. The move by Facebook also follows in the footsteps of a slew of other tech giants. After all, the announcement comes after a period of significant public discourse about the technology’s intrusive and inaccurate applications, with activists and police alike expressing fear regarding nonconsensual digital identification. Some may have believed the move signaled broader consensus regarding the potential privacy abuses, threats to civil liberties, and questionable accuracy of facial recognition technologies. In November, Facebook announced that it was planning to shutter it’s eleven-year-old facial recognition system, deleting more than one billion users’ facial scan data in the process. Amanda Wagner JD Anticipated May 2023, Law & Public Policy Scholar

Clearview facial recognition