Clearview Pitch Deck Says It's Aiming For A 100 Billion Image Database, Restarting Sales To The Private Sector

from the just-shamelessly-laying-it-all-out-there dept

Clearview AI -- the facial recognition tech company so sketchy other facial recognition tech companies don't want to be associated with it -- is about to get a whole lot sketchier. Its database, which supposedly contains 10 billion images scraped from the internet, continues to expand. And, despite being sued multiple times in the US and declared actually illegal abroad, the company has expansion plans that go far beyond the government agencies it once promised to limit its sales to.

A Clearview pitch deck obtained by the Washington Post contains information about the company's future plans, all of which are extremely concerning. First, there's the suggestion nothing is slowing Clearview's automated collection of facial images from the web.

The facial recognition company Clearview AI is telling investors it is on track to have 100 billion facial photos in its database within a year, enough to ensure “almost everyone in the world will be identifiable,” according to a financial presentation from December obtained by The Washington Post.

As the Washington Post's Drew Harwell points out, 100 billion images is 14 images for every person on earth. That's far more than any competitor can promise. (And for good reason. Clearview's web scraping has been declared illegal in other countries. It may also be illegal in a handful of US states. On top of that, it's a terms of service violation pretty much everywhere, which means its access to images may eventually be limited by platforms who identify and block Clearview's bots.)

As if it wasn't enough to brag about an completely involuntary, intermittently illegal amassing of facial images, Clearview wants to expand aggressively into the private sector -- something it promised not to do after being hit with multiple lawsuits and government investigations.

The company wants to expand beyond scanning faces for the police, saying in the presentation that it could monitor “gig economy” workers and is researching a number of new technologies that could identify someone based on how they walk, detect their location from a photo or scan their fingerprints from afar.

Clearview is looking for $50 million in funding to supercharge its collection process and expand its offerings beyond facial recognition. That one thing it suggests is more surveillance of freelancers, work-from-home employees, and already oft-abused "gig workers" is extremely troubling, since it would do little more than give abusive employers one more way to mistreat people they don't consider to be "real" employees.

Clearview also says its surveillance system compares favorably to ones run by the Chinese government… and not the right kind of "favorably."

[Clearview says] that its product is even more comprehensive than systems in use in China, because its “facial database” is connected to “public source metadata” and “social linkage” information.

Being more intrusive and evil than the Chinese government should not be a selling point. And yet, here we are, watching the company wooing investors with a "worse than China" sales pitch. Once again, Clearview has made it clear it has no conscience and no shame, further distancing it from competitors in the highly-controversial field who are unwilling to sink to its level of corporate depravity.

Clearview may be able to talk investors into parting with $50 million, but -- despite its grandiose, super-villainesque plans for the future -- it may not be able to show return on that investment. A sizable part of that may be spent just trying to keep Clearview from sinking under the weight of its voluminous legal bills.

Clearview is battling a wave of legal action in state and federal courts, including lawsuits in California, Illinois, New York, Vermont and Virginia. New Jersey’s attorney general has ordered police not to use it. In Sweden, authorities fined a local police agency for using it last year. The company is also facing a class-action suit in a Canadian federal court, government investigations in Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom and complaints from privacy groups alleging data protection violations in France, Greece, Italy and the U.K.

As for its plan to violate its promise to not sell to commercial entities, CEO Hoan Ton-That offers two explanations for this reversal, one of which says it's not really a reversal.

Clearview, he told The Post, does not intend to “launch a consumer-grade version” of the facial-search engine now used by police, adding that company officials “have not decided” whether to sell the service to commercial buyers.

Considering the pitch being made, it's pretty clear company officials will decide to start selling to commercial buyers. That's exactly what's being pitched by Clearview -- something investors will expect to happen to ensure their investment pays off.

Here's the other… well, I don't know what to call this exactly. An admission Clearview will do whatever it can to make millions? That "principles" is definitely the wrong word to use?

In his statement to The Post, Ton-That said: “Our principles reflect the current uses of our technology. If those uses change, the principles will be updated, as needed.”

Good to know. Ton-That will adjust his company's morality parameters as needed. Anything Clearview has curtailed over the past two years has been the result of incessant negative press, pressure from legislators, and multiple adverse legal actions. Clearview has done none of this willingly. So, it's not surprising in the least it would renege on earlier promises as soon as it became fiscally possible to do so.

Filed Under: ethics, facial recognition
Companies: clearview, clearview ai

France Says Clearview Broke Privacy Laws, Orders It To Delete Residents' Data

from the suprisingly-not-terrible-use-of-the-GDPR dept

Clearview is again on the receiving end of an order demanding it delete all the local data it scraped from thousands of websites and social media platforms.

Canada led the way in booting the facial recognition company, ordering its exit in February. A government investigation concluded Clearview had broken the country's privacy laws with its web scraping and ordered it to delete all Canadian data.

Australia was next, kicking Clearview out in November. It too concluded (after an investigation) that laws were broken by the country. The United Kingdom followed suit, more or less. It didn't kick Clearview out but threatened it with a $23 million fine and forbade it from processing any more data collected in the UK.

Now, it's France's turn. The GDPR is in play this time, which means this announcement is likely to be followed by similar orders from other members of the European Union. Richard Nieva reports on the latest for BuzzFeed.

Facial recognition company Clearview AI has been hit with another order by a country’s watchdog agency to delete the personal data of its citizens, the latest in a global rebuke by privacy regulators around the world.

On Thursday, France’s Commission Nationale Informatique et Libertés (CNIL) said Clearview had breached Europe’s overarching data protection law, known as GDPR. It gave the company two months to delete the personal information it had collected and stop “unlawful processing” of the data.

Clearview hasn't been actually asked to leave, but considering its business model relies on it breaking local laws, there's little reason for it to stick around. Its CEO has responded with some overdone shrugging, claiming it doesn't matter what France says because it doesn't maintain a local office.

In response to the claims, Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That argued that his company isn’t bound by Europe’s data regulation law. “Clearview AI does not have a place of business in France or the EU, it does not have any customers in France or the EU, and does not undertake any activities that would otherwise mean it is subject to the GDPR,” he said in an emailed statement.

While some of that may be true, it's pretty clear a lot of it isn't. I don't believe Clearview geofences its data-scraping, which means it's certainly still collecting info on European residents. And claiming it has no customers in France or the EU is demonstrably false.

This is from earlier reporting on Clearview by BuzzFeed:

Data reviewed by BuzzFeed News shows that by early 2020, Clearview had made its way across Europe. Italy’s state police, Polizia di Stato, ran more than 130 searches, according to data, though the agency did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for France’s Ministry of the Interior told BuzzFeed News that they had no information on Clearview, despite internal data listing employees associated with the office as having run more than 400 searches.

While it may be technically true it has no customers in the European Union, entities in the union were at least given trial access to Clearview's AI and utilized it. Those are the kind of "activities" that would be "subject to the GDPR." The locals weren't running searches on American citizens. They were running them on residents of their respective countries, meaning there was searchable data collected by Clearview in violation of the GDPR.

At this point, Clearview may no longer be collecting data on Europeans and other countries that have demanded it delete data. But that doesn't mean it's legally in the clear. A belated exit is better than nothing, but no documents have surfaced that show Clearview isn't still gathering data from areas where it's been told to cease operations. All we have are Clearview's assurances, which aren't all that reassuring, considering they're half-truths at best. It still has yet to show it has learned anything from the past 18 months of negative coverage and has never offered anything approaching contrition for its horrific actions and incredibly irresponsible business model.

Filed Under: facial recognition, france, privacy
Companies: clearview

Patent Awarded To Clearview AI For Its Innovative, Web-Scraping Fuckery

from the here's-hoping-actual-bankruptcy-will-swiftly-follow-Clearview's-moral-ba dept

Clearview AI has begun travelling the long road back to semi-respectability.

Over the past 18 months, Clearview has gone from unknown to pariah, rejected even by its in-group. It turned web scraping into a surveillance tool, providing everyone from billionaires to repressive regimes with a tool that leverages 10 billion images scraped from the web to create a comprehensive facial recognition system.

Clearview has attempted to reform since gaining international infamy. It claims to have ended all sales to private entities, including retailers and potential VC investors. (Caveat: It has provided no documentation to back this claim up.) It has finally submitted its AI to examination by the National Institute of Science and Technology and received one of NIST's highest accuracy ratings. (Caveat: facial recognition tech is inherently flawed, no matter how accurate it is.) And it has pulled out of a handful of countries where its scraping of the web was found illegal. (Caveat: It has done so only after being placed under investigation and continues to dispute these findings.)

What's next for Clearview and its slow escalation towards begrudging acceptance by governments that haven't banned it yet? Why, it's some IP protection for its AI and its process for matching faces found in Clearview's web-scraped haystack. Alexandra Levine of Politico has the story on Clearview's acquisition of at least one form of government approval.

Clearview AI has gotten the green light on a federal patent for its facial recognition technology — an award that the company says is the first to cover a so-called “search engine for faces” that crawls the internet to find matches.

[...]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office sent Clearview a “notice of allowance” on Wednesday, meaning the patent will be approved once the company pays certain administrative fees. The patent covers Clearview’s “methods of providing information about a person based on facial recognition,” including its “automated web crawler” that scans social networking sites and the internet and its algorithms that analyze and match facial images obtained online.

Congratulations, I guess. There's plenty of prior art out there, but Clearview does indeed have a unique product. It's not that it created facial recognition AI that performs in a novel way. It's that it decided it was OK to use the entire web as a source for images and personal information, bundled this all up, and sold it to whoever wanted it. That's the "creative" aspect of it. This is a patent acquired by being a shit-heel -- doing something no other facial recognition company ever considered doing.

The unique aspect -- the one deserving of a patent -- is the most problematic aspect of the company's AI. And with this in its hip pocket, Clearview has now obtained federal government protection for a product that violates laws both domestic and foreign.

For that reason, the only congratulations Clearview will receive are ones it bestows on itself. And it already has. The head of the company somehow views this as a vindication of his godawful invention -- one that relies on the world's population to fill its database. Here's the CEO patting himself on the back for coming up with something universally abhorred.

“There are other facial recognition patents out there — that are methods of doing it — but this is the first one around the use of large-scale internet data,” Clearview CEO and co-founder Hoan Ton-That told POLITICO in an exclusive interview. The product uses a database of more than 10 billion photos, Ton-That said, and he has emphasized that “as a person of mixed race, having non-biased technology is important to me.”

To the first half of that statement: kindly fuck off. That's not an accomplishment. That's a symptom of sociopathy.

And to the second half, may I ask what even the fuck are you talking about? The AI will be biased. There hasn't been one created that isn't. All facial recognition tech tends to do better accurately identifying white male faces. And operator bias will take care of the rest.

Cops will inject their own biases when performing searches and odds are most faces searched by government agencies will be of minorities. Investigators will be free to impose their biases on the search results, discarding those that don't point toward their favored suspects and accepting those that align with the narrative they've concocted. The tools may change but policing doesn't. The only thing Clearview adds is the possibility of cop shops avoiding local restrictions on social media monitoring software use and the ability to engage in their biases at unprecedented scale.

Hats off, Clearview. Enjoy your 20 years of IP protection. Chances are, you won't even need it. Nobody else has tried to emulate your web scraping ways. Maybe that will change over the next couple of decades, but at the moment, you stand alone in your unwavering shamelessness.

Filed Under: facial recognition, patents
Companies: clearview

UK Government Says Clearview Owes It $23 Million For Violating Privacy Laws

from the your-business-is-no-longer-welcome-here-but-we'll-still-cash-your-check dept

Well, it couldn't happen to a more deserving shitheel. Clearview, the tech company with 10 billion facial recognition images and zero shame, has now been uninvited from the largest portions of the British Empire.

In February of this year, the Canadian government officially asked Clearview to get off its lawn following an investigation by the country's Privacy Commission. The Commission concluded Clearview's modus operandi -- scraping images and personal data from hundreds of websites -- violated the nation's privacy laws. By that point, Clearview had already pulled out of the Canadian market, but not before allowing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to test drive its product. (This test driving was also determined to be illegal.)

Nine months later, the Australian government did the same thing, coming to many of the same conclusions. Local laws were ignored by Clearview when it scraped the web for personal info, cutting Australian residents out of the consent loop. The Australian government told Clearview to get the hell out, to which Clearview responded that it did nothing wrong and that it had stopped selling to Australian government agencies months before, when the investigation was initiated.

That left the county seat of the British Empire (so to [very colloquially] speak), the United Kingdom itself. As Natasha Lomas reports for TechCrunch, the UK government is offering an incentive plan to Clearview to hasten its exit.

Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI is facing a potential fine in the UK.

It has also been handed a provisional notice to stop further processing of UK citizens’ data and to delete any data it already holds as a result of what the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) described as “alleged serious breaches” of national data protection law.

If Clearview wants to do business with the UK, it will need to pay up front. And it will have to change its collection procedure -- one that makes the generous assumption that anything posted on the open web is Clearview's for the taking scraping. Not only will Clearview be expected to delete existing data gathered on UK citizens and alter its intake processes, it will need to open up its wallet and give the UK government what it wants before proceeding.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has today announced its provisional intent to impose a potential fine of just over £17 million [$23 million USD] on Clearview AI Inc – a company that describes itself as the ‘World’s Largest Facial Network’. In addition, the ICO has issued a provisional notice to stop further processing of the personal data of people in the UK and to delete it following alleged serious breaches of the UK’s data protection laws.

Much like Australia and Canada, the UK government says data privacy laws were broken by Clearview when it gathered UK residents' info without their knowledge or consent. The ICO also points out further violations, including the gathering of data without a "lawful reason" and deciding it was entitled to hold onto any scraped data indefinitely, even when 99.9% of what Clearview has collected has nothing to do with current or past investigations by law enforcement or national security agencies.

$19 million isn't exactly pocket change for Clearview. Unlike other tech companies, it's not sitting on massive amounts of VC funding. It's also difficult to say whether Clearview is even profitable at this point. While it has received some capital infusions from investors, its valuation is only $130 million, which doesn't exactly suggest the company is poised for exponential growth.

And its future isn't going to get any rosier if it keeps getting told to leave the country by major free world governments who would give Clearview a veneer of respectability as customers, but are instead delivering even more PR and legal headaches to a company that has done nothing but generate negative press since its exposure. If this keeps up, the only entities Clearview will be able to sell to will be ones that further harm its reputation, turning it into the NSO Group of the facial recognition world. You might be able to make a comfortable living selling to the dregs of international society to aid and abet oppression. But why the fuck would you want to?

Filed Under: facial recognition, privacy, uk
Companies: clearview

Controversial Facial Recognition Company Calls Out Clearview, Demands It Ditch Its Database Of 10 Billion Scraped Images

from the Pots,-kettles-yelling-'black'-at-each-other dept

Clearview has burned its bridges inside the facial recognition tech industry. Despite it being largely morally malleable, the industry as a whole appears to have cut ties with CEO Hoan Ton-That's startup, which relies on more than 10 billion images scraped from the web to generate a database for its customers to match faces with.

The company played it fast and loose upon rollout, handing it out to whoever seemed interested, inviting them to run searches against photos of friends and family members. The "give it a spin" invitations were handed out to government agencies as well, inviting cops to play image roulette with Clearview's ever-expanding database.

To date, the efficacy of Clearview's AI remains untested. Clearview did finally volunteer to have the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) examine its product for accuracy but only allowed it to run a one-to-one test -- the kind that would, for instance, allow a phone user to unlock their phone via facial recognition.

This is not the product Clearview sells. Clearview sells one-to-many matching, relying on images and other personal info scraped from the internet. This practice has alienated the internet. It has also gotten Clearview kicked out of two countries and served with multiple lawsuits. Consequently, other facial recognition tech companies are cursing Clearview both over and under their breath as the company somehow manages to remain viable in the face of months of negative press coverage.

Persona non grata status apparently applies to even other controversial facial recognition tech companies. AnyVision spent some time in the media spotlight for being used by the Israeli military to surveill Palestinians. It managed to take down Microsoft with it (albeit temporarily), exposing the tech giant's pinky-swear-rejection of enabling abusive surveillance to be the lip service it was. AnyVision doubled down on its first mistake(s) by threatening to sue news agencies that reported on this factual development.

AnyVision resurfaced a couple of years later as the company behind pervasive surveillance systems deployed by Texas public schools. AnyVision appeared to be good at what it did. It matched faces per school hot lists and let administrators know any time those faces were detected. A little too good, perhaps. The system racked up 164,000 "hits" during its seven-day test run, returning as many as 1,100 matches for a single student.

AnyVision is back. Sort of. It has rebranded as Oosto, divested itself of some of its more problematic deployments, and is now taking shots at Clearview.

Back in September, it argued that facial recognition companies selling to government agencies should offer customers a blank database -- one the end users could fill with mugshots and persons of interest. This was a clear shot across Clearview's bow. Clearview's main selling point is its scraped database of 10 billion images. AnyVision also forwarded this suggestion to a number of government bodies, including the UK's Surveillance Commissioner and the NIST.

It's always good to be wary of private companies pleading for the government to regulate them more. It often means incumbents are looking for better ways to stave off competition by helping enact rigorous guidelines that upstarts can't afford to implement. And AnyVision's suggested "fixes" for facial recognition tech obviously aims to exclude Clearview from the government market in multiple countries, making it that much easier for the rebranded company to find customers in need of controversial tech that at least won't be as controversial as Clearview.

The war of words continues, albeit behind a paywall:

Oosto (formerly Anyvision) has called out Clearview AI, stating "that biometrics should be deployed with empty databases" in a recent release, referring to the US company's practice of scraping billions of photos from social media to use in its database.

Clearview has offered a rebuttal, but until this one is scraped from its host, we won't know exactly how it defended itself. But it seems clear even from this very truncated exchange of ideas that AnyVision believes Clearview is bad and Clearview believes it is good… making it a minority of one. But one thing is clear: if Clearview gets out of the scraping business it's less likely to make enemies of governments, private citizens, and its competitors in the market. But if Clearview hasn't changed its practices following a year of caustic press coverage, it's unlikely to do so just because a competitor is waving its revamped Gadsden flag in front of any regulatory agency that will listen to it.

Filed Under: facial recognition
Companies: anyvision, clearview

Clearview's Facial Recognition AI One Of The Best In The Business, Says NIST

from the man-but-what-a-business dept

Some good news for Clearview, the bottom dweller of the facial recognition field. The prodigious scraper of web content has finally submitted its algorithm (the one it actually sells to government agencies) to the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) and has obtained a score that justifies its frequent blustering about how accurate its AI is. Here's Kashmir Hill with the details for the New York Times.

In results announced on Monday, Clearview, which is based in New York, placed among the top 10 out of nearly 100 facial recognition vendors in a federal test intended to reveal which tools are best at finding the right face while looking through photos of millions of people. Clearview performed less well in another version of the test, which simulates using facial recognition for providing access to buildings, such as verifying that someone is an employee.

This vindicates CEO Hoan Ton-That's heretofore unproven claims that Clearview's AI is one of the best in the business. Prior to this, the only data backing Ton-That's assertions came from an internal test performed by a non-independent entity. Now, Ton-That can add the NIST results to his company's sales pitches, which may make it a bit more palatable to government agencies on the fence about shelling out tax dollars for a sordid little product with an unproven AI. Its previous submission to NIST tested its one-to-one AI (something used to unlock phones, for instance) -- a feature Clearview does not use and does not market to customers.

But this is hardly a vindication of Clearview as a whole, much less its business model. Scraping the open web for images is a really shady way to generate a database -- one that now holds more than 10 billion images. The more hay you put in the haystack, the greater the chances of confusing hay for needles. And these results don't change what's already wrong with all facial recognition tech: the fact that it's always worse when it comes to correctly identifying anyone other than white males.

It also won't make Clearview's web-scraping ways any more acceptable or legal. It has been evicted from two countries (Canada and Australia) for violating national privacy laws. It is being sued in two US states for the same reason. And it has become a pariah in an industry full of morally-suspect tech purveyors -- a company so unseemly even other bottom feeders marketing biased tech to cop shops refuse to have anything to do with it.

And it won't make CEO Hoan Ton-That any less full of shit. This test may have proven Clearview has the AI chops to run with the big boys, but it doesn't change the fact that his claims about helping law enforcement clear cases have been continually rebutted by the law enforcement agencies he says relied on his tech to find dangerous criminals. As long as Clearview remains solvent, it is a threat to people's freedoms and safety. If the NIST test results in more customers for Clearview, it will increase the chance someone will be misidentified and put at the mercy of people with a whole lot of guns and power.

Filed Under: facial recognition, nist
Companies: clearview

Clearview Officially Kicked Out Of Australia For Violation Country's Privacy Laws

from the going-to-be-missing-most-of-the-Five-Eyes-pretty-soon dept

Clearview -- the facial recognition tech company whose unproven AI runs searches on 10 billion images scraped from the web -- has been booted from another country.

Last July, Clearview pulled out of Canada while under investigation by its government. Eight months later, the investigation concluded, with the Canadian Privacy Commissioner finding Clearview's scraping of web content violated the rights of Canadian citizens by gathering their information without their permission.

The same thing has just happened in Australia. An investigation by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), in conjunction with the UK's Information Commissioner's Office, has determined Clearview broke the law there as well.

Commissioner [Angelene] Falk found that Clearview AI breached the Australian Privacy Act 1988 by:

• collecting Australians’ sensitive information without consent
• collecting personal information by unfair means
• not taking reasonable steps to notify individuals of the collection of personal information
• not taking reasonable steps to ensure that personal information it disclosed was accurate, having regard to the purpose of disclosure
• not taking reasonable steps to implement practices, procedures and systems to ensure compliance with the Australian Privacy Principles.

The determination orders Clearview AI to cease collecting facial images and biometric templates from individuals in Australia, and to destroy existing images and templates collected from Australia.

We'll see if that order has any effect. It's unclear whether Clearview has any mechanism in place to determine where content originated from and/or what content contained in its 10-billion image database belongs to Australian citizens. Hopefully it does have something to aid in compliance with orders like these. Because it would be extremely irresponsible -- especially following a similar ejection six months ago -- to continue to scrape the web in contravention of two governments' orders to cease collection and destroy locally-sourced content.

The Information Commissioner says Clearview's collection methods are "unreasonably intrusive and unfair." They also put millions of people at risk for identity fraud if the database were ever to be compromised. In addition, the database undoubtedly contains millions of pictures of minors and other at-risk groups, like victims of crimes -- both of which are given additional privacy protections under Australian law.

The report also notes that Clearview's brief run in Australia had the opportunity to create more than theoretical harm. Australian law enforcement agencies -- including the federal police -- performed test runs of Clearview's software over a period of five months (October 2019 - March 2020). The Australian Federal Police is currently being investigated for its use of Clearview's tech to determine whether its test runs complied with privacy laws.

Clearview's rebuttal to this report claims two things: it pulled access from Australian law enforcement following the initiation of this investigation and that, as an American company, it does not have to comply with Australia's laws.

The Information Commissioner disagrees:

However, Commissioner Falk said she was satisfied Clearview AI was required to comply with Australian privacy law and that the information it handled was personal information covered by the Privacy Act.

“Clearview AI’s activities in Australia involve the automated and repetitious collection of sensitive biometric information from Australians on a large scale, for profit. These transactions are fundamental to their commercial enterprise,” she said.

“The company’s patent application also demonstrates the capability of the technology to be used for other purposes such as dating, retail, dispensing social benefits, and granting or denying access to a facility, venue or device.

“This case reinforces the need to strengthen protections through the current review of the Privacy Act, including restricting or prohibiting practices such as data scraping personal information from online platforms."

Two countries have banned Clearview entirely and they won't be the last to do so. Back in the United States, where Clearview can't use the "local laws don't apply to us" excuse, the company is being sued in two states for the same reason: violating privacy laws. It has no friends in the facial recognition field and its use of web scraping to compile a database of billions of images hasn't made it any allies anywhere else in the tech field.

Sooner or later, Clearview's going to be stuck with selling to authoritarians and oligarchs who give zero fucks about the privacy of their constituents and are always looking for new tools to track down and punish their critics. Given its non-response to nearly two years of negative press, it appears Clearview is willing to wade into this cesspool to ensure it remains profitable.

Filed Under: australia, facial recognition, privacy
Companies: clearview

Clearview Finally Submits AI For Independent Testing; Only Tests Feature It Isn't Actually Selling

from the competing-for-a-high-score-no-one-cares-about dept

At long last, Clearview has finally had its AI tested by an independent party. It has avoided doing this since its arrival on the facial recognition scene, apparently content to bolster its reputation by violating state privacy laws, making statements about law enforcement efficacy that are immediately rebutted by law enforcement agencies, and seeing nothing wrong with scraping the open web for personal information to sell to government agencies, retailers, and bored rich people.

Kashmir Hill reports for the New York Times that Clearview joined the hundreds of other tech companies that have had their algorithms tested by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

[M]ore than two years after law enforcement officers first started using the company’s app, Clearview’s algorithm — what allows it to match faces to photos — has been put to a third-party test for the first time. It performed surprisingly well.

In a field of over 300 algorithms from over 200 facial recognition vendors, Clearview ranked among the top 10 in terms of accuracy, alongside NTechLab of Russia, Sensetime of China and other more established outfits.

That seems to confirm CEO Hoan Ton-That's continuous claims that Clearview's AI is one of the most accurate in the business. But there's a huge caveat to his claims and these test results. This test does not reflect real-world use of Cleaview's tech.

But the test that Clearview took reveals how accurate its algorithm is at correctly matching two different photos of the same person, not how accurate it is at finding a match for an unknown face in a database of 10 billion of them.

No one's buying access to Clearview to perform this task. And that certainly isn't what Clearview is selling or promising to potential customers when it pitches its 10 billion image database. So, Clearview calling this test result "an unmistakable validation" of its tech is, well, pure bullshit. It doesn't validate anything. All it possibly shows is that Clearview could be used to verify identity by matching faces -- something that might be useful for unlocking a phone or providing access to restricted areas.

What it doesn't show is Clearview's accuracy when it compares an uploaded photo to its billions of scraped images. Supposedly, Clearview will be allowing NIST to run a 1-to-many test of its AI (Ton-That says that will happen "shortly"). If that happens, we'll finally be able to see if Clearview's AI is as accurate as its CEO has repeatedly said it is.

Even if it is accurate, it's still facial recognition tech -- something that comes with a lot of inherent drawbacks. Every AI tested by NIST showed some form of bias, like performing better when checking white male faces for matches. And it won't change the fact that Clearview's database is the product of web scraping -- something that's not illegal but definitely questionable. Internet users may agree to share information with others and the sites they use, but no one affirmatively agrees to allow Clearview to scoop up that information and sell it to government agencies. That's what has resulted in it being sued in a couple of states, and being kicked out of Canada entirely.

Clearview has no product without the unwilling and unaware contributions of millions of internet users. Even if its AI isn't as terrible as we're all free to believe it is, it will still just be the bottom feeder in a murky cesspool of facial recognition tech providers. Floating to the top of the NIST's tank may give it better copy for its marketing materials, but it won't earn it any respect.

Filed Under: ai, facial recognition, privacy
Companies: clearview

Clearview Is So Toxic Even Other Surveillance Tech Purveyors Want Nothing To Do With It

from the bring-back-spitting-in-disgust-old-world-style dept

Outside of Clearview's CEO Hoan Ton-That, it's unclear who truly likes or admires the upstart facial recognition tech company. In the short time since its existence was uncovered, Clearview has managed to turn itself into Pariah-in-Chief of a surveillance industry full of pariahs.

Clearview hasn't endeared itself to the sources for its 10-billion image database, which are (in descending order) (1) any publicly-accessible website/social media platform, and (2) their users. The company has been sued (for violating state privacy laws) in the United States and politely asked to leave by Canada, which found Clearview's nonconsensual harvesting of personal info illegal.

It has subpoenaed activists demanding access to their (protected by the First Amendment) conversations with journalists. It has made claims about law enforcement efficacy that have been directly contradicted by the namechecked police departments. It has invited private companies, billionaire tech investors, police departments in the US, and government agencies around in the world to test drive the software by running searches on friends, family members, and whoever else potential customers might find interesting/useful to compile a (scraped) digital dossier on.

Clearview intends to swallow up all the web it can. Caroline Haskins' report for Business Insider (alt link here) catches Clearview's vice president of federal sales pretty much saying the only way to avoid being added to Clearview's database is to stop being online.

"People are constantly dumping their — it's just a constant," Clearview's Jones said during the roundtable event, referring to the steady stream of people posting their photos online, only for Clearview to scrape them.

The same report shows why Clearview's is so bad at PR. It has a PR team -- one that continually stresses the AI does not provide "matches," but rather "investigative leads." The difference between the terms is the extent of liability. If Clearview only generates leads, it cannot be blamed for false positives. If it says it delivers "matches," it possibly can be sued for wrongful arrests.

But CEO Hoan Ton-That can't stop using the terms interchangeably, which indicates he feels his software generates matches, thus inviting additional culpability.

"No one has done what we do at this scale with this accuracy," he said later in the conference, adding that anyone "is able to solve cases instantaneously if they get matches in the system."

The "accuracy" Ton-That claims no one can match is "98.6% accuracy per one million faces" -- an assertion Clearview's made for a couple of years now. Whether this claim is anywhere near 98.6% accurate remains to be seen. The AI has never been independently tested or audited.

We know how Clearview feels about itself. But how do the competitors in the market feel about it? Caroline Haskins spoke to other surveillance tech purveyors at the Connect:ID industry event and found other providers of facial recognition AI weren't thrilled Clearview was out there giving already-controversial tech an even worse reputation.

Several industry professionals openly expressed not liking or respecting the company. One government contractor said Clearview was "creepy." He told me he'd read about the company's extensive ties to the far right and was alarmed by that.

In one discussion, an attendee called the company "the worst facial-recognition company in the world."

Well, there's one thing surveillance tech purveyors and surveillance tech targets can agree on: Clearview took a bad thing, made it worse, and seems willing to trade paint with the internet at large to maintain its "Images in a facial recognition database [privately-owned]' lead.

While it's normal for competitors to criticize their rivals, the statements made here imply Clearview is bad for the facial recognition tech industry -- something that threatens these competitors' livelihoods. And that's not acceptable, even if the collective marketing of problematic AI to government agencies doesn't appear to bother them a bit.

Filed Under: facial recognition, surveillance
Companies: clearview

Clearview Celebrates 10 Billion Scraped Images Collected, Claims It Can Now Recognize Blurred, Masked Faces

from the getting-bigger-and-getting-worse dept

Clearview's not going to let several months of bad press derail its plans to generate even more negative press. The facial recognition tech company that relies on billions of scraped images from the web to create its product is currently being sued in multiple states, has had its claims about investigative effectiveness repeatedly debunked and, most recently, served (then rescinded) a subpoena to transparency advocacy group Open the Government demanding information on all its Clearview-related FOIA requests as well as its communications with journalists.

I don't know what Clearview is doing now. Maybe it thinks it can still win hearts and minds by not only continuing to exist but also by getting progressively worse in terms of integrity and corporate responsibility. Whatever it is that Clearview's doing to salvage its reputation looks to be, at best, counterproductive. I mean, the only way Clearview could get worse is by getting bigger, which is exactly what it's done, according to this report by Will Knight for Wired.

The company’s cofounder and CEO, Hoan Ton-That, tells WIRED that Clearview has now collected more than 10 billion images from across the web—more than three times as many as has been previously reported.

Ton-That says the larger pool of photos means users, most often law enforcement, are more likely to find a match when searching for someone. He also claims the larger data set makes the company’s tool more accurate.

That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it -- and by "it," I mean Clearview's unaudited, untested facial recognition AI -- is that adding more hay increases the odds of someone grabbing some hay and thinking it's actually a needle.

Yet another way of looking at this is that Clearview's mass scraping of every bit of publicly accessible web data it can may be legal, but it certainly isn't morally acceptable. While people do largely understand that their public posts to sites can be accessed by nearly anyone, they certainly don't expect someone to collect their photos and data in bulk, package it up, and sell it to government agencies. And, in some states, this sort of activity may actually be illegal, hence the lawsuits being brought by government officials.

On top of the 10 billion images Clearview swears it will only sell to responsible adult government employees, the company is now claiming it can do some real CSI-type stuff with its tech.

Ton-That says it is developing new ways for police to find a person, including “deblur” and “mask removal” tools. The first takes a blurred image and sharpens it using machine learning to envision what a clearer picture would look like; the second tries to envision the covered part of a person’s face using machine learning models that fill in missing details of an image using a best guess based on statistical patterns found in other images.

If you feel selling government agencies a more efficient way to generate false positives and false negatives is the way to future profitability, this would be the route to take. Without a doubt, tech advances will eventually make this more accurate, but rolling out unproven machine learning on top of unproven AI is only going to compound errors. Then there's the bias problem, which has been a problem for all facial recognition software. That includes those that have been independently tested and examined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Notably, Clearview has yet to subject its AI to outside testing.

Finally, there's this statement from Clearview CEO Ton-That:

The company says it is not currently pitching the technology outside of the US or to private industry. “We're focusing on the United States, because we want to get it right here,” Ton-That says. “We never want this to be abused in any way.”

Whether or not this statement about its current potential customer list is true remains to be seen. Clearview has already pitched its product to private companies and foreign governments. And it appears to have exited one foreign market solely because its product was declared illegal following a government investigation.

And claiming that the company does not want its product "abused in any way" directly contradicts the stuff it says to entities it wants to sell its product to. Emails from the company's marketing staff encouraged potential law enforcement customers (as well as the occasional billionaire) to "experiment" with the software by running searches on friends, family members, and others who never consented to be part of multiple Clearview test drives.

Is Clearview the worst AI product out there? In terms of accuracy, who knows? It hasn't been independently reviewed. In terms of everything else, there's really nothing out there that competes with it. The company's nonchalant conversion of the open web into a surveillance tool sets it apart from the competition. Its latest "advances" aren't going to do anything to rehabilitate its reputation.

Filed Under: facial recognition, surveillance
Companies: clearview