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Clearview expands sales of its facial recognition tools

The company's private offering gets the subject's permission before running facial matches.

An illustration of a polygonal face

Amid scrutiny over violations of privacy, Clearview AI seems to be inviting more.

Image: Antonis Makriyannis / Protocol

Barely more than two weeks after it agreed to stop selling its existing collection of face prints to private entities, facial recognition firm Clearview AI has a brand new plan to sell its software to private companies instead.

The software isn't exactly what Clearview AI has caught flack for in the past. Since the company's recent settlement with the ACLU bans Clearview from providing social media face matching technology to private entities, the product now on offer obtains the subject's permission to match them to ID photos and other data a client collects, according to Reuters.

The product's aim is to verify individuals' identities to give them access to certain spaces, such as visitor management systems used in schools. A company presenter at Montgomery Summit investor conference said the offering could significantly boost Clearview AI's sales.

Columbian lending app Vaale is reportedly going to use Clearview AI to match selfies to user-uploaded ID photos, replacing Amazon's facial recognition service, Rekognition. Vaale's CEO Santiago Tobón told Reuters that the company "can't have duplicate accounts and we have to avoid fraud."

"Without facial recognition, we can't make Vaale work," Tobón told Reuters.

Clearview's expansion into the private sector follows the company being ordered to to delete all data belonging to U.K. residents and halt data collection in that country for violating its data protection laws. The order was the fourth time the company has been forced to wipe data of an entire country's residents, and followed an investigation by U.K. and Australian privacy watchdogs that found the company failed to use the data it collected in a "fair and transparent" way, collected it without a lawful reason and didn't meet the data protection standards required for biometric data.

The company also settled with the ACLU in mid-May for violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which prohibits companies from taking and using Illinois residents' biometric identifiers without their permission.

Nat Rubio-Licht

Nat Rubio-Licht is a Los Angeles-based news writer at Protocol. They graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in newspaper and online journalism in May 2020. Prior to joining the team, they worked at the Los Angeles Business Journal as a technology and aerospace reporter.

clearview aifacial recognition
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