Caveats apply, your privacy may vary
Clearview AI has promised to stop selling its controversial face-recognizing tech to most private US companies in a settlement proposed this week with the ACLU. The New-York-based startup made headlines in 2020 for scraping billions of images from people’s public social media pages. These photographs were used to build a facial-recognition database system, allowing the biz to link future snaps of people to their past and current online profiles. Clearview’s software can, for example, be shown a face from a CCTV still, and if it recognizes the person from its database, it can return not only the URLs to that person’s social networking pages, from where they were first seen, but also copies that allow that person to be identified, traced, and contacted. That same year, the ACLU sued the biz, claiming it violated Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which requires organizations operating in the US state to obtain explicit consent from its residents to collect their biometric data, which includes their photographs. Now, both parties have reached a draft settlement [ PDF] to end the legal standoff. As part of that proposed deal, Clearview has agreed to stop giving or selling access to its database system to most private companies and organizations across the US. We say most because there are caveats. Also, the deal has to be accepted by the courts. As per the proposed settlement, Clearview cannot share its database with any state or local government entity in Illinois for five years, nor any private entities in the state, and will allow residents to opt-out of the database.
