Law enforcement officers have used Clearview AI's facial recognition database nearly a million times, Hoan Ton-That, the company's CEO, told the BBC.

Clearview AI built a massive facial recognition database by scraping 30 billion photos from Facebook and other social media platforms without users’ permission, which law enforcement has accessed nearly a million times since 2017[1].

The company markets its technology to law enforcement as a tool “to bring justice to victims,” with clients including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. However, privacy advocates argue it creates a “perpetual police line-up” that includes innocent people who could face wrongful arrests from misidentification[1:1].

Major social media companies like Facebook sent cease-and-desist letters to Clearview AI in 2020 for violating user privacy. Meta claims it has since invested in technology to combat unauthorized scraping[1:2].

While Clearview AI recently won an appeal against a £7.5m fine from the UK’s privacy watchdog, this was solely because the company only provides services to law enforcement outside the UK/EU. The ruling did not grant broad permission for data scraping activities[2].

The risks extend beyond law enforcement use - once photos are scraped, individuals lose control over their biometric data permanently. Critics warn this could enable:

  • Retroactive prosecution if laws change
  • Creation of unauthorized AI training datasets
  • Identity theft and digital abuse
  • Commercial facial recognition systems without consent[1:3]

Sources:

  1. Business Insider - Clearview AI scraped 30 billion images from Facebook and other social media sites ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. BBC - Face search company Clearview AI overturns UK privacy fine ↩︎

  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
    12·
    3 days ago

    I claimed my name fory Facebook account when it first came out, but I’ve never posted anything in it, especially any photos of my face.

    I thought Facebook was a bad, creepy idea from the beginning.

    • hector@lemmy.today
      3·
      3 days ago

      I have never posted pictures on Facebook either, and have likewise always considered it extremely reckless for everybody else to put all of their information on there without even any protections in law and mechanisms of enforcement.

      The federal government just streamlined purchasing information from data brokers, before every agency bought it piecemeal and they paid for the same information twice oftentimes. Now they basically buy everything and distribute it to the agencies that want it in an end run around the Bill of Rights. No warrants, no judges involved. Let alone probable cause or even reasonable suspicion for mass collection of data. https://theintercept.com/2025/05/22/intel-agencies-buying-data-portal-privacy/