Clearview AI Wants Every Human On Earth To Be In Its Facial Recognition Database

It seems that facial recognition firm Clearview AI has bigger plans for its tech, hoping to eventually be able to cover almost every human being in the world. 

In a financial presentation dating December, seen by The Washington Post, the firm purportedly expressed that it was “on track” to have 100 billion photos of faces in its database within a year, which is more than enough to ensure that most of the world’s population—an estimated 7.9 billion—will be included.

According to data in the presentation, it was also stated that there are already 10 billion images in the Clearview database. Every month, this number increases further by a whopping 1.5 billion.

The Post reports that most of these images are taken from social media networks “without the consent of the website or the people who were photographed.”

As if this wasn’t concerning enough, the December presentation also states that research into new tech, which could identify a person just from their walking pattern or scan their fingerprint from afar, is currently underway. 

Clearview founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That argued in defense of the firm, telling the Post that “every photo in the data set is a potential clue that could save a life, provide justice to an innocent victim, prevent a wrongful identification, or exonerate an innocent person.”

Although many sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have ordered the company to stop sifting through their users for data collection, Clearview has justified its actions with the First Amendment. This has, however, been rejected.

[via Ars Technica and The Hill, image via Shutterstock]