Lawsuit Against Face Recognition Platform 

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Face recognition poses severe risks to security and privacy. The American Civil Liberties Union has sued Clearview AI for scraping billions of photos from public social media profiles, without people’s explicit consent, to train its facial-recognition system.

The lawsuit, filed in Illinois, claims the company violated the state’s stringent Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). Companies operating in Illinois must obtain explicit consent from individuals if they collect their biometric data, whether it’s in the form of fingerprints or photographs.

“Using face recognition technology, Clearview has captured more than three billion faceprints from images available online, all without the knowledge – much less the consent – of those pictured.”

In January, it was revealed that this New York startup has amassed a database of three billion images by downloading people’s pictures from public pages on sites like Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, Instagram, and Twitter. The dataset was used to train facial recognition algorithms, so that when images, say from a CCTV camera, are fed into Clearview’s system, the code looks for a match, and if one is found, it spits out everything it knows about that person: their harvested photos, and the URLs to the source pages that typically contain more personal information, such as names and contact details. This allows Clearview’s customers to turn faces in security camera footage stills into complete personal profiles, for example.

In February, Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook all served the startup cease-and-desist letters ordering it to stop stealing images from their platforms, and to delete existing pics in its massive database, according to theregister.com.

“The capture and storage of faceprints leaves people vulnerable to data breaches and identity theft. It can also lead to unwanted tracking and invasive surveillance by making it possible to instantaneously identify everyone at a protest or political rally, a house of worship, a domestic violence shelter, an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and more.. Because the common link is an individual’s face, a faceprint can also be used to aggregate countless additional facts about them, gathered from social media and professional profiles, photos posted by others, and government IDs.”