Documents Show Clearview Is Selling Facial Recognition Tech To Retailers, Fitness Centers, And Human Rights Violators

from the should-just-be-honest-since-it's-all-going-to-come-out-anyway dept

Clearview -- the latest (and most troubling) entrant into the facial recognition tech sweepstakes -- says it's product is just for law enforcement. And law enforcement has seemingly welcomed the web-scraped facial recognition database with open arms. Clearview's marketing documents claim the company works with over 900 law enforcement agencies in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

Clearview's app puts the agencies a few clicks away from over three billion images scraped from sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Those being scraped aren't happy about it but there's little they can do but engage in some cease-and-desist shouting.

But Clearview's claim that it's only making this available to law enforcement agencies is false. New documents, obtained by BuzzFeed, show the company is selling its product to a number of other entities, both public and private.

The internal documents, which were uncovered by a source who declined to be named for fear of retribution from the company or the government agencies named in them, detail just how far Clearview has been able to distribute its technology, providing it to people everywhere, from college security departments to attorneys general offices, and in countries from Australia to Saudi Arabia.

That's the public sector buy-in. Here's the private sector's investment.

More than 200 companies have Clearview accounts, according to the documents, including major stores like Kohl’s and Walmart and banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America. While some of these entities have formal contracts with Clearview, the majority — as with public sector entities — appear to have only used the facial recognition software on free trials.

This list also includes a number of entertainment venues, casinos, fitness centers, and, oddly enough, the NBA.

So, it's not just for cops. That might explain the company's hands-off attitude towards the entities it has publicly acknowledged it works with. Cops are encouraged to test-drive the software by searching friends and family members. Nothing like encouraging misuse right off the bat to dissuade law enforcement officers from using this tool for personal evil.

As BuzzFeed notes, most of these appear to be limited trials of Clearview's software. But a few private entities are apparently paying for the privilege of running security camera footage against Clearview's scraped-together database.

Company logs reviewed by BuzzFeed News include Walmart (nearly 300 searches), Best Buy (more than 200 searches), grocer Albertsons (more than 40 searches), and Rite Aid (about 35 searches). Kohl’s, which has run more than 2,000 searches across 11 different accounts, and Macy’s, a paying customer that has completed more than 6,000, are among the private companies with the most searches.

Meanwhile, US agencies are enthusiastically participating in the exploitation of this crowdsourced (so to speak…) database. BuzzFeed notes the CBP has already registered 280 accounts and run almost 7,500 searches. The Secret Service isn't far behind, having run 5,600 searches. Other federal customers include the DEA, ATF, and FBI.

Clearview has also stated its plan for international expansion begins and ends with Canada. This has already been exposed as untrue, but information in these documents shows how aggressively Clearview is pursuing customers around the world.

It shows that Clearview AI has expanded to at least 26 countries outside the US, engaging national law enforcement agencies, government bodies, and police forces in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, India, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

And while Clearview's CEO has promised not to sell to "adverse" countries like North Korea, China, and Iran, this is the only line it appears to have drawn. The documents show Clearview has offered its software to agencies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates -- both notorious violators of human rights.

Clearview clearly can't be trusted. It has spent its limited time in the public eye lying about what it does and who it does it with. Hopefully, the endless negative press will deter its growth. Unfortunately, there's an undeniable market for unregulated facial recognition tech and Clearview's promise of billions of photos to match faces against beats everything else offered by anyone else. As long as the market exists, Clearview will fill it.

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Filed Under: customers, facial recognition, law enforcement

Companies: clearview, clearview ai