Social platforms, then selling those photos - breaches the terms of service of every platform from which the photos were taken. And that process - lifting user photos from In the initial report on Clearview, a slew of major tech platforms were named as targets for their scraping efforts: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Venmo.Ĭlearview mined each of those platforms for user photos, and then added them to Clearview's database, which it sells. Contracts to use the service cost as much as $50,000 for a two-year deal.įacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gesticulating in front of an American flag during a speech at Georgetown University in October 2019.Īndrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images "More than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year," the piece pointed out. Moreover, it put those images into a searchable database then sold that tool to American law enforcement. What the Times piece revealed, beyond the functionality of Clearview's tools, was stunning: The company had scraped billions of publicly available image from major social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. It was the first look the public got at a company that, until then, was operating in secrecy. The system - whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites - goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants."
"The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It" was the title of the piece, and it revealed the stunning details of what Clearview's tech could do: "You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. In mid-January, Clearview AI went from unknown startup to the star of its very own New York Times exposé.
#Clearview movies software#
That searchable database is then sold to police departments and federal agencies, Clearview says, but additional reports indicate that the company has also given access to other clients, including billionaires, retail chains like Walmart and Macy's, the NBA, and even some high schools.įacial recognition software created by the Chinese tech company Huawei.
Photos of you, photos of friends and family - all of it is scraped and saved by Clearview AI. If you want to identify someone, you simply upload a photo or snap a new one, and Clearview's software attempts to make a match. So, what does the software do? It identifies people using images scraped from the web and social media platforms, without permission, to create a searchable database. The software is produced by a company named Clearview AI - a relatively unknown tech startup supported by a slew of somewhat better-known investors: From early Facebook backer Peter Thiel to Texas-based investor Hal Lambert, who's most notable for running an investment fund with the "MAGA" ticker symbol. Police departments across the United States are paying tens of thousands of dollars apiece for access to software that identifies faces using images scraped from major web platforms like Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
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