Clearview's Facial Recognition App

Clearview's Facial Recognition App
Short Title	Clearview AI Helps Governmental Agencies and Private Organisations with Facial Recognition
Location	Global
Date	early 2020
Solove Harm	Aggregation, Identification, Secondary Use, Surveillance
Information	Identifying, Computer Device, Physical Characteristic, Contact, Location
Threat Actors	Clearview AI, govermental and private organisations using Clearview AI
Individuals
Affected	Potentially anybody, who has their pictures online
High Risk Groups
Tangible Harms

A facial recognition app Clearview AI has a data base, containing more than 3 billion pictures from millions of websites helping to identify a person from any picture by comparing it to the photos from the data base.

Description

Clearview AI is a startup from New York, which in early 2020 was found to have created a data base with more than 3 billion of pictures from Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and millions of other websites, in order to help law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images to identify the suspects. Later on it turned out, that the technology is available not only for law enforcement agencies, but also to multiple other governmental organizations, as well as private organizations. Several privacy violations can be identified here. One of the concerning issues is Surveillance, because the searches for people of interest are run secretly and individuals has no way of knowing that they are being searched for. Another privacy violation is Identification: face recognition technology allows to link the identifying information to any picture that is being run through the app, even if the picture is low quality and the face is hardy recognizable by a human eye (e.g. a person wears a hat or glasses). There is also a problem with Aggregation, because the technology combines a picture of an individual with the photos from the data base along with links to where those photos appeared, which not only leads to identification of a person, but reveals other personal information about them, including contact, location, etc. The creators of the app claimed, that the product was created only to be used strictly by law enforcement, but some documentation (e.g. clients lists of Clearview) proves, that the solution was also sold to and used by thousands of private organizations in retail, banking, education, entertainment. This can be seen as Secondary Use. Among those companies are major corporations such as Walmart, T-Mobile, Macy’s, etc. as well as some high schools, gaming companies and many more. The technology expanded into at least 26 countries outside the USA, including Canada, multiple European countries, India, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. The creators of the app acknowledged designing a prototype for use with augmented-reality glasses, which potentially might allow the user of the glasses identify any person they saw.

Sources

https://themarkup.org/ask-the-markup/2020/03/12/photos-privacy
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/clearview-ai-fbi-ice-global-law-enforcement