Technology
ACLU is suing Clearview AI for facial recognition, calling it
The American Civil Liberties Union is suing notorious Illinois Clearview AI corporation for violation of the Biometric Identity Privicities Act (BIPA), arguing that the company has unlawfully gathered and processed the data on Illinois residents without their permission or consent.
"The company has provided private companies, the police, federal agencies, and rich individuals with this massive faceprint database that is not known to the public and allows them to track and target secretly whenever they choose to use face recognition technology," writes Attorney Nathan Freed Wessler in a blog post outlineing the lawsuit.
"The company is Clearview AI, and if it is not stopped it will terminate the privacy we know."
Thanks to media coverage, including a high-profile article from The New York Times in January, Clearview AI came to notoriety earlier this year, proving the technology to be high-precision and widely-used across law enforcement agencies and enterprises. This is because Clearview scraped photos and other data from social media sites against the rules of these platforms, leading to a database with over 3 billion images, matched to the photo uploaded with sophisticated, machine-learning algorithms.
During the last five months, technology companies have sent numerous cessation and withdrawal orders to Clearview, but it is not clear whether the company has ever complied with orders that it has deleted data from public social networking pages and posts. The organization responded to the criticisms by saying that it only sells its product for individual use to the public and recently said it would stop marketing the technology to private companies and instead concentrate on compliance.
Nevertheless, many newspapers have found that, during the trial process, Clearview has delivered its product to investors, senior managers and other individuals and that critics fear that its system of face recognition is the foundation for rampant violation of civil rights.
Clearview has created the nightmare scenario we've long been terrified of, by creating a distributed database with billions of frontprints without our approval or permission, and has breached the ethical boundaries that other businesses have failed to even attempt to. It is unknown to the United States government or to any US company that such a massive biometric trove has ever been compiled, "says Wessler.
"Clearview brings fuel to the fire and offers access to a mobile app, which helps users-and even people who use the app on a test basis-to immediately upload and download similar images of a video of an anonymous person."
BIPA, the Illinois Privacy Act and one of the only pieces of U.S. legislation protecting facial recognition data against misuse is one way of combating Clearview conduct that could prove efficient. That is the same regulation as Facebook compelled the illegal use of facial recognition to pay $550 million in images that were added to its social network earlier this year.
ACLU claims the "Clearview actions explicitly breach the BIPA," requiring the knowledge and written permission of a client to the compilation and storage of any biometric identification for some reason, whether it is a faceprint or fingerprint.
Clearview sought to circumvent BIPA by telling private businesses earlier in the month that the products would no longer be offered. In its decision not to provide the product to any state organization, independent of whether it is a privately-owned or an enforcing organization, Clearview made the announcement as part of a separate BIPA-based proceeding in Illinois. Clearview took this decision as a voluntary action.
The company further stated that it would no longer collect data from Illinois-based IP addresses, take additional measures to prevent data collection for residents of Illinois, and establish an opt-out tool.
Clearview could also be liable to BIPA while only keeping data on Illinois residents, which enables ACLU to lodge another lawsuit.
The ACLU states that it works together with its Illinois local chapter and the Edelson PC law firm and calls for a Court application to remove all biometric information that it has stored for Illinois residents and to stop collecting new information until it complies with BIPA 's approval rules.
"As approved, Clearview is going to threaten our anonymity, privacy and security interests," writes Wessler. "To protect their identity and places of residence from individuals seeking damages, people may change their names and addresses, but they can not alter their faces."
