Security News > 2020 > May > Clearview AI won’t sell vast faceprint collection to private companies
Clearview AI - the web-scraping, faceprint-amassing biometrics company that's being sued over collecting biometrics without informed consent - says it's no longer going to sell access to its program to a) private entities or b) any entity whatsoever that's located in Illinois.
Clearview AI founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That has claimed that the results are 99.6% accurate.
The Illinois suit charges the company with breaking the nation's strictest biometrics privacy law - Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act - by scraping some 3 billion faceprints from the web to sell to law enforcement and to what's turned out to be a motley collection of private entities, including Macy's, Walmart, Bank of America, Target, and Major League Baseball team The Chicago Cubs.
As it is, many of those companies - including Facebook, Google and YouTube - have ordered Clearview to stop scraping their sites.
On Wednesday, Clearview also said, in an 18-page memo to oppose the preliminary injunction, that it would no longer collect biometric data from images stored on servers that are displaying Illinois IP addresses or from websites with URLs containing keywords such as "Chicago" or "Illinois." The company says it's also implementing an opt-out mechanism to enable people to have their photos excluded from its database.