But their ability to do so is limited: scraping data from public sites is legal under US law, and American data protection regulations are slim, and mostly bound up in contract law – by which Clearview is unencumbered, because it didn’t make any agreements with the people whose data it processed. In the furore following the NYT’s publication, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn all demanded the company stop collecting images from their sites. Instead, it took the gamble that even if it did get caught, it was unlikely to be forced to delete data it had already collected. It would have been impossible to get that information with Facebook’s permission, even pre-Cambridge Analytica, and so Clearview just didn’t bother. 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. As the New York Times’ Kashmir Hill wrote: And Clearview gathered that in the most brazen manner possible: it just took it all from social media. The impressive part of Clearview’s work was, instead, in building up the database required to make the system functional.Īny facial recognition system like that needs at its heart a massive collection of people’s faces, linked with their names. Similar tech was, of course, already built in to Facebook, and Russian company FindFace offered a similar service domestically since 2016. Clearview’s product was simple: facial recognition technology, marketed to law enforcement in particular, that could take a picture of a suspect and return a solid guess as to their name.Īs technology, it wasn’t actually hugely novel. The company burst into public awareness in early 2020, after a New York Times exposé described it as “the secretive company that might end privacy as we know it”.
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