Clearview AI used nearly 1m times by US police, it tells the BBC

Facial recognition firm Clearview has run nearly a million searches for US police, its founder has told the BBC.

CEO Hoan Ton-That also revealed Clearview now has 30bn images scraped from platforms such as Facebook, taken without users’ permissions.

The company has been repeatedly fined millions of dollars in Europe and Australia for breaches of privacy.

Critics argue that the police’s use of Clearview puts everyone into a “perpetual police line-up”.

“Whenever they have a photo of a suspect, they will compare it to your face,” says Matthew Guaragilia from the Electronic Frontier Foundation . “It’s far too invasive.”

Clearview’s system allows a law enforcement customer to upload a photo of a face and find matches in a database of billions of images it has collected.

It then provides links to where matching images appear online. It is considered one of the most powerful and accurate facial recognition companies in the world.

(BBC)