Security News > 2020 > January > Facial recognition firm sued for scraping 3 billion faceprints
New York facial recognition startup Clearview AI - which has amassed a huge database of more than three billion images scraped from employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Venmo - is being sued in a potential class action lawsuit that claims the company gobbled up photos out of "Pure greed" to sell to law enforcement.
The suit against Clearview was just one chunk of shrapnel that flew after the New York Times published an exposé about how Clearview has been quietly selling access to faceprints and facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies across the US, claiming that it can identify a person based on a single photo, revealing their real name and far more.
Clearview told the Times that more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, and it's sold the technology to a handful of companies for security purposes.
Senator Edward J. Markey echoed the Times's "End of privacy as we know it" prediction, sending a letter to Clearview on Thursday in which he suggested that its technology could "Facilitate dangerous behaviors and effectively destroy individuals' ability to go about their lives anonymously".
Markey called on Clearview to provide a list of all the law enforcement or intelligence agencies that Clearview has talked to about acquiring its technology and which ones are currently using it.