Facial recognition firm Clearview AI tells investors it is seeking massive expansion beyond law enfo

[Nevilledog]

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Drew Harwell
@drewharwell
Scoop: I got Clearview AI's big new pitch to investors. The facial recognition giant wants to work with private companies in retail and the gig economy. And with $50 million, they said they can get to 100 billion faces, enough to identify everyone on earth

washingtonpost.com
Facial recognition firm Clearview AI tells investors it is seeking massive expansion beyond law...
The facial recognition company Clearview AI is telling investors it’s on track to have 100 billion facial photos in its database within a year, enough to ensure “almost everyone in the world will be...
10:58 AM · Feb 16, 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/16/clearview-expansion-facial-recognition/

No paywall
https://archive.fo/hfsG4

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.

Those images — equivalent to 14 photos for each of the 7 billion people on Earth — would help power a surveillance system that has been used for arrests and criminal investigations by thousands of law enforcement and government agencies around the world.

And 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.

The 55-page “pitch deck,” the contents of which have not been reported previously, reveals surprising details about how the company, whose work already is controversial, is positioning itself for a major expansion, funded in large part by government contracts and the taxpayers the system would be used to monitor.

*snip*

[dalton99a]

1. Kick

Clearview has built its database by taking images from social networks and other online sources without the consent of the websites or the people who were photographed. Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube have demanded the company stop taking photos from their sites and delete any that were previously taken. Clearview has argued its data collection is protected by the First Amendment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoan_Ton-That

According to the New York Times, Ton-That dropped out of university in Australia and moved to San Francisco, California in 2007. He was unsuccessful in early ventures to create social media applications after the advent of Apple's iPhone.[4] In 2009, he created the company HappyAppy and its app ViddyHo, a phishing application/computer worm that spammed a user's contacts.[5] Ton-That was sought by the police when this worm spread in 2009.[6][7][8][9] He then created fastforwarded.com, a similar phishing site. Ton-That later worked at AngelList.[10]

After attempting to become a model, Ton-That met Richard Schwartz at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in 2016. They partnered on an application with Schwartz paying server costs and basic expenses and Ton-That hiring two engineers who worked on software that could scrape images from Internet sources to cross reference on a facial recognition algorithm.[4][11] It emerged from stealth mode in late 2017 and was linked to far right/alt-right supporters such as Chuck Johnson, Mike Cernovich, Douglass Mackey, and Paul Nehlen.[10]

Clearview AI received investments from Peter Thiel and Naval Ravikant totaling more than $200,000, which later converted into equity in the company.[12]

[crickets]

2. Well, this isn't horrifying at all...

In the presentation, Clearview argues that the industry-wide caution is a huge business opportunity. The company included its rivals’ logos to note that it has little domestic competition — and 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.

The presentation, which a recipient shared with The Post, throws a spotlight on the company’s ambitions to become one of the world’s leading merchants of surveillance technology, even as some lawmakers worry the company poses a dangerous threat to civil liberties and privacy rights.

Perhaps it's time to convert that worrying into some action.

Senators seek limits on some facial-recognition use by police, energizing surveillance technology debate
https://archive.ph/xtzJ9 (related WaPo article)

Just blocking public money (Widen bill) is not enough. There need to be some rules that delineate citizens' privacy rights. Good to see there is pushback on this, but it isn't going far enough. The root problem is the data collection itself.

[crickets]

4. Comment from second article:

While Wyden may be correct about the “risk” of government purchasing images and other personnel information he can’t point to a specific federal government misuse at this time. The private sector has already misused this data. The law needs to provide protection that covers the private sector as well as government use. Facial recognition has a future role for both government and private sector; but the advantages of this technology must be weighted against the costs in loss of privacy, and other social and private costs.

[bucolic_frolic]

3. Anonymous still exist?

[crickets]

5. "seeking massive expansion"

It's already a done deal. The following excerpt is just a tiny piece of long, disturbing, must read article. This company is unleashing a monster, with no sense of responsibility for what it is doing.

Clearview’s Facial Recognition App Has Been Used By The Justice Department, ICE, Macy’s, Walmart, And The NBA
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/clearview-ai-fbi-ice-global-law-enforcement

In its quest to create a global biometric identification system to span both public and private sectors, Clearview has signed paid contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, and Macy’s, according to the document obtained by BuzzFeed News. The company has credentialed users at the FBI, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Interpol, and hundreds of local police departments. In doing so, Clearview has taken a flood-the-zone approach to seeking out new clients, providing access not just to organizations, but to individuals within those organizations — sometimes with little or no oversight or awareness from their own management. [snip]

Clearview’s client list also extends to the American education system, with more than 50 educational institutions across 24 states named in the log. Among them are two high schools. [snip]

More than 200 companies have Clearview accounts, according to the documents, including major stores like Kohl’s and Walmart and banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America. While some of these entities have formal contracts with Clearview, the majority — as with public sector entities — appear to have only used the facial recognition software on free trials. [snip]

For a company that maintains its tools are for law enforcement, Clearview’s client list includes a startling number of private companies in industries like entertainment (Madison Square Garden and Eventbrite), gaming (Las Vegas Sands and Pechanga Resort Casino), sports (the NBA), fitness (Equinox), and even cryptocurrency (Coinbase). [snip]

The company’s client list ... shows that Clearview AI has expanded to at least 26 countries outside the US, engaging national law enforcement agencies, government bodies, and police forces in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, India, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. [more]

[Jim__]

6. "... enough to identify everyone on earth." Accurately?

Outside of the issues of privacy, how can they assure that they can identify everyone on earth accurately? It matters if they mis-identify someone as participating in, say, a future January 6th type event and that person loses their job and/or goes to prison based on that mis-identification.

[JanMichael]

7. They should merge with that Boston Dynamics company

And another company that makes weapons. That could make one company that could have a really smart robot that could kill you after identifying you and taking an independent action. By the way has anybody seen bigbug?