#CLEARVIEW SOFTWARE SOFTWARE#

The market for commercial uses of this technology is growing, as is the volume of facial recognition-related patents the USPTO has issued. Jules Polonetsky, CEO of the Future of Privacy Forum, said Clearview’s patent raises alarm about the prospect of “running real time recognition tied to data checks on someone you just met, dates, drug users, or homeless people.” “If it was all private data, that would be a completely different story.” “All information in our datasets are all publicly available info that people voluntarily posted online - it’s not anything on your private camera roll,” Ton-That said. Facebook, which recently announced that it would shut down its own facial recognition system, has asked Clearview to do the same.Ĭlearview argues that there is a First Amendment right to make use of public material.

Twitter, Google, YouTube, LinkedIn and Venmo last year sent cease-and-desist letters demanding that Clearview stop scraping user photos and data from their platforms. The tool has also angered the major social media companies. have accused Clearview of breaking their privacy and data protection laws. “They are patenting the very part of it that’s in violation of international human rights law.”Īustralia and the U.K. He argued that Clearview’s use of an image database built without people’s knowledge or consent is a de-facto violation of their right to privacy. “The part that they’re looking to protect is exactly the part that’s the most problematic,” said Matt Mahmoudi, an Amnesty International researcher who is leading the group’s work to ban facial recognition. The company’s technology is widely used by top law enforcement bodies in the U.S., including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, and at least 10 federal agencies have said they plan to expand their use of facial recognition in the next two years.Ĭlearview’s critics argue that the imprimatur of a patent could speed the uptake of a technology that is dangerously intrusive.

The product uses a database of more than 10 billion photos, Ton-That said, and he has emphasized that “as a person of mixed race, having non-biased technology is important to me.” “There are other facial recognition patents out there - that are methods of doing it - but this is the first one around the use of large-scale internet data,” Clearview CEO and co-founder Hoan Ton-That told POLITICO in an exclusive interview. The patent covers Clearview’s “methods of providing information about a person based on facial recognition,” including its “automated web crawler” that scans social networking sites and the internet and its algorithms that analyze and match facial images obtained online. Patent and Trademark Office sent Clearview a “ notice of allowance” on Wednesday, meaning the patent will be approved once the company pays certain administrative fees.

#CLEARVIEW SOFTWARE SOFTWARE#

Markey has led legislation to put a moratorium on government use of biometric software made by Clearview and others, but momentum on the issue seen during the last Congress has waned and federal guardrails for the technology are far off. “Facial recognition technology is metastasizing throughout the federal government, and I am deeply concerned about this trend towards increased surveillance,” privacy hawk Sen. Now, some of those critics fear that codifying Clearview’s work with a patent will accelerate the growth of these technologies before legislators or regulators have fully addressed the potential dangers.

Clearview software