Activists sue facial recognition firm claiming it snatched their identities

Clearview AI says its software complies with the law and is protected by the 1st Amendment

Facial recognition software company Clearview AI has appropriated the identities of billions of “unsuspecting” people from websites including social media platforms to sell to police, chilling the right to free speech and endangering immigrants and people of color, a new lawsuit claims.

“Clearview also scrapes images of people that were uploaded without their knowledge or consent, including images posted by friends or relatives and even images of people who inadvertently appear in the backgrounds of photographs taken by strangers,” the suit filed Tuesday in Alameda County Superior Court alleged.

“The sheer volume of online photographs Clearview scrapes to capture faceprints for its database makes it a near certainty that anyone whose photographs are posted to publicly accessible portions of the internet will have been subjected to surreptitious and nonconsensual faceprinting.”

The suit claims Clearview has “illicitly” and “illegally” collected more than three billion photos of “unsuspecting individuals,” giving it a database nearly seven times bigger than the FBI’s.

“Clearview has provided thousands of governments, government agencies, and private entities access to its database, which they can use to identify people with dissident views, monitor their associations, and track their speech,” the suit alleged. “Its mass surveillance technology disproportionately harms immigrants and communities of color.”

Clearview CEO Hoan Tom-That said in an emailed statement that while other facial recognition software has misidentified people of color, “an independent study has indicated that Clearview AI has no racial bias.” Accurate, non-biased facial recognition technology can reduce the chances of the wrong person being apprehended by authorities, Tom-That said. “It’s much preferable to have law enforcement accurately identify someone, as opposed to looking for a general description, where wrongful detention, apprehension, and arrests are more likely, especially for those in black and brown communities.”

The American Civil Liberties Union has said that use of Clearview’s technology by law enforcement agencies “will end privacy as we know it” and the group disputed the validity of the company’s racial-bias study.

Floyd Abrams, a prominent free-speech lawyer representing Clearview, said in an emailed statement that the firm “complies with all applicable law and its conduct is fully protected by the First Amendment.”

Major Silicon Valley technology firms including Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn have demanded that New York-based Clearview stop scraping images from their platforms. The suit claims Clearview applies algorithms to the photos to create a “faceprint” that is a person’s unique “biometric signature.”

According to the lawsuit, the San Mateo County’s Sheriff’s Office has received access to the software on a trial basis, the Antioch Police Department has bought a license to use it, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — an admitted Clearview customer — can use the software even in cities including San Francisco, Berkeley, Alameda and Oakland that have banned public-agency use of facial recognition over fears related to privacy, false identifications and racial bias.

Neither the San Mateo Sheriff’s Office nor Antioch police immediately responded to requests for comment. ICE said in an emailed statement that it did not routinely use facial recognition technology for non-criminal immigration enforcement. The agency said it uses Clearview AI’s software primarily for investigating “child exploitation and other cybercrime cases.” Agents “may review open-source information during the course of a criminal investigation to support the agency’s investigative authorities,” ICE said. “This is an established procedure that is consistent with other law enforcement agencies.”