Clearview AI co-founder and CEO Hoan
Ton-That disclosed the plans Friday to The Associated Press in order to clarify
a recent federal court filing that suggested the company was up for sale.
“We don't have any plans to sell the
company,” he said. Instead, he said the New York startup is looking to launch a
new business venture to compete with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft in
verifying people's identity using facial recognition.
The new “consent-based” product would use
Clearview's algorithms to verify a person's face, but would not involve its
ever-growing trove of some 20 billion images, which Ton-That said is reserved
for law enforcement use. Such ID checks that can be used to validate bank
transactions or for other commercial purposes are the “least controversial use
case” of facial recognition, he said.
That's in contrast to the business practice
for which Clearview is best known: collecting a huge trove of images posted on
Facebook, YouTube and just about anywhere else on the publicly-accessible internet.
Regulators from Australia to Canada, France
and Italy have taken measures to try to stop Clearview from pulling people's
faces into its facial recognition engine without their consent. So have tech
giants such as Google and Facebook. A group of US lawmakers earlier this year
warned that “Clearview AI's technology could eliminate public anonymity in the
United States."
Despite opposition from lawmakers,
regulators, privacy advocates and the websites it scrapes for data, Clearview
has continued to rack up new contracts with police departments and other
government agencies. In the meantime, its growing database has helped
Clearview's artificial intelligence technology learn and grow more accurate.
One of its biggest known federal contracts
is with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement — particularly its investigative
arm, which has used the technology to track down both the victims and
perpetrators of child sexual exploitation. Clearview in March also started
offering its services for free to the Ukrainian military, in part to help
identify dead Russian soldiers using Clearview's repository of about 2 billion
images scraped from Russian social media website VKontakte.
“They've been able to identify dead bodies,
even with facial damage,” Ton-That said Friday.
The official minutes from a March 17
hearing in a Chicago federal court said that Clearview AI was “considering
selling the app platform to other entities,” citing one of the lawyers who's
been defending the company in a case involving alleged violation of an Illinois
digital privacy law.
The minutes also said the “sale of
Clearview's app” would be discussed further once the company discloses more
details to the plaintiffs. Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act allows
consumers to sue companies that don't get permission before harvesting data
such as faces and fingerprints.
Ton-That said the minutes incorrectly
relayed what the company was trying to tell the judge about potentially
expanding its business beyond law enforcement uses.
“We let the court know we're exploring this
idea,” he said Friday, noting the company's previous assertions that it was
only selling its services to law enforcement.
Asked about future commercial applications
during an interview with the AP in late February, Ton-That emphasised his
company's ongoing focus on police work.
“We're really focused on law enforcement
right now,” he said, describing how the company's mission had evolved from
commercial applications into helping to solve crime.
“We looked at all different kinds of use
cases: building security, ID checks, even hotels, hospitality," he said.
"But when we gave this to law enforcement, we saw such amazing success
right away where they could ID so many victims of crime or perpetrators of it
that it was a kind of a no-brainer at that point to really focus on that kind
of use case.”
He added at the time that if the company
shifted to other uses, it would let the public and courts know about it. He
downplayed what he described as the “lofty goals” that Clearview pitched to
prospective investors in a document the Washington Post reported on in
February.
The Post said the company's financial
presentation from December proposed a variety of potential commercial uses of
Clearview technology, including to monitor “gig economy” workers or provide
companies with “real-time alerts” if certain people are detected, and boasted
of a face-image database that's growing so large that “almost everyone in the
world will be identifiable.”
A lawyer representing activists suing
Clearview on privacy grounds in California said Friday her clients are most
concerned about the government's use of the technology to track protesters and
immigrants, but any usage based on Clearview's “unauthorized capture and sale”
of faceprints could violate privacy rights.
“The future potential uses for Clearview
appear to be a moving target,” said Sejal Zota, legal director of Just Futures
Law. “And the scale is terrifying.”