Clearview: scraping the barrel
Clearview AI is a US facial recognition company, which since its founding in 2017 has spent its time scraping a multitude of services on the web to find photographs of people along with their name or some detail of their identity, using them to create a huge database of more than twenty billion likenesses. If you can find a photograph of yourself on the web accompanied by your name, you are more than likely in the Clearview database (and a few others).
The idea of scraping the web to get hold of all kinds of data is a powerful one, and there are multiple rulings that accredit the procedure as legal. Clearview, however, is an example of the extent to which this type of procedure can be abused and turned into something that, although it may be legal in its origin because it is limited to collecting data that is publically available, gives rise to results that openly violate any reasonable protection of privacy. In fact, the problem with Clearview is not how it obtains its data, but what it does with it.
Facial recognition technologies are relatively mature, but by no means error-free, and even more so when applied to people from non-white ethnic groups. The use of such technologies has already proved problematic, and even more so when the tool is sold to security agencies and authoritarian governments around the world, or used as a toy for millionaires.
Companies such as Twitter, Meta (specifically Facebook and Instagram) and many others have tried to stop Clearview from scraping their users’ photos, but it was not until early May that the company settled a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) out of court that will prevent it from selling access to its database to private companies, but not to state or government agencies. Countries such as Australia, France, Italy and the UK have fined Clearview and demanded the removal of their citizens’ images from its database, but the company and its CEO, Hoan Ton-That, claim that “Clearview AI is not based in the EU, has no customers in the EU, and does not conduct any activities that imply it is subject to the GDPR”, which leads one to doubt the effectiveness of those removal requests and should motivate plaintiff countries to issue an international search and arrest warrant against him and all of his company’s executives.
Behind the company is the sinister Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal who used a good part of his profits to create another equally controversial company for similar reasons and who possibly knows more about you than you do yourself: Palantir. Proof that the use of the web and the information it contains must have limits and that it isn’t so much the tool itself that is at fault, as the use it is put to.
(En español, aquí)