Clearview Is About To Patent Its Controversial ‘Search Engine For Faces’ AI
Image ID 189299142 © via Andrey Popov | Dreamstime.com
Clearview AI, the company behind a controversial “search engine for faces,” has been given the go-ahead for a federal patent to protect the technology. The pioneering software uses images of the public from social media to match those in law enforcement databases or surveillance footage.
Privacy advocates have expressed dismay at the development, long having pointed out the ethical implications of crawling the internet to match persons to images without their knowledge or consent. Civil rights groups have pointed out that the technology is also error-prone, and misidentifies women and minority ethnicities at a higher rate, which could lead to grave outcomes such as false arrests.
However, Clearview’s published findings have shown its artificial intelligence to be notably accurate, and so far has no known instances of its technology leading to wrongful arrests. Though this hasn’t put to rest worries that the patent could potentially fast-track the software’s expansion before regulators can put in place protective legislation.
“Facial recognition technology is metastasizing throughout the federal government, and I am deeply concerned about this trend towards increased surveillance,” said Senator Ed Markey.
According to Politico, the US Patent and Trademark Office has sent Clearview a “notice of allowance”—meaning it will be granted the patent once it pays administrative fees. The patent will cover the company’s “methods of providing information about a person based on facial recognition,” including the “automated web crawler” which scans social media sites for potential matches.
“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 co-founder Hoan Ton-That told the site.
Ton-That emphasized that the software draws from a database of over 10 billion images, and that “as a person of mixed race, having non-biased technology is important to me.”
It remains to be seen if a compromise can be reached between Clearview and its critics, though the patent now gives the company an advantage to expand the use of its technology, which is already being used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security.
“The part that they’re looking to protect is exactly the part that’s the most problematic. They are patenting the very part of it that’s in violation of international human rights law,” remarked Matt Mahmoudi, the leader of an Amnesty International group against facial recognition software.
Notably, another hurdle Clearview will have to clear as it looks to expand is how it plans to deal with major social media platforms, many of which do not appreciate the software scanning its databases. Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Venmo, Facebook, and YouTube have called for the company to stop crawling their databases, though the firm said it is making use of its First Amendment right to scan public material.
“All information in our datasets are all publicly available info that people voluntarily posted online—it’s not anything on your private camera roll. If it was all private data, that would be a completely different story,” said Ton-That.
While Ton-That promised that Clearview would only be made available to federal departments and that he doesn’t “intend to ever make a consumer version of Clearview AI,” the wording in its forthcoming patent has stated the technology could possibly be used for other purposes.
The company said “it may be desirable for an individual to know more about a person that they meet, such as through business, dating, or other relationships.” It posited that traditional methods of introduction, such as business cards, could be unreliable as some people choose to share false information.
This, as expected, has become another red flag for privacy advocates, who feel it leaves the door open to the possibility of a consumer-based product in the future.
“It shows a willingness to go down a slippery slope of basically being available in any context,” said Mahmoudi.
[via Politico, cover image via Andrey Popov | Dreamstime.com]
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