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posted by janrinok on Friday March 13 2020, @09:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the facing-up-to-it dept.

Vermont sues Clearview, alleging "oppressive, unscrupulous" practices:

Clearview AI's bread and butter is a tool providing facial recognition on a massive scale to law enforcement, federal agencies, private companies, and—apparently—nosy billionaires. The company has achieved this reportedly by scraping more or less the entire public Internet to assemble a database of more than 3 billion images. Now that there are spotlights on the secretive firm, however, Clearview is facing a barrage of lawsuits trying to stop it in its tracks.

The latest comes from Vermont Attorney General T.J. Donovan, who filed suit against Clearview this week claiming violations of multiple state laws.

The complaint (PDF) alleges that Clearview, which is registered as a data broker under Vermont's Data Broker Law, "unlawfully acquires data from consumers and business concerns" in Vermont.

Clearview built its massive database by gobbling up "publicly available" data from the Internet's biggest platforms—including Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others—most of whom have since issued cease-and-desist letters telling Clearview in no uncertain terms to knock it off. These images are frequently of minors, the complaint notes, and Clearview admitted in its state filing to knowingly having images of minors collected without anyone's consent. Vermont's data law prohibits "fraudulent acquisition of brokered personal information," and the state argues that Clearview's screen-scraping tactics are exactly that.

What Clearview does with its ill-gotten data is also a problem, the state argues. The Green Mountain State's first issue is from a security perspective: the company has already suffered at least one data breach, in which its client list—which it has repeatedly refused to make public—was stolen. The second issue is privacy.


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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 13 2020, @10:06PM (10 children)

    It ain't going to be easy to find one that'll say there was anything fraudulent about collecting publicly available information and it's going to be impossible to get it upheld through the appellate process. They may be shady as hell and amoral as all fuck but there ain't no laws that I can think of making anything they did actually illegal. Maybe you fuckers should have spent less time sniping at each other on the campaign trail and done your fucking jobs; you know, legislating.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @10:51PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @10:51PM (#970905)

    It ain't going to be easy to find one that'll say there was anything fraudulent about collecting publicly available information

    You're not wrong there, on skimming the complaint it seems to be mainly (though not exclusively) concerned with violating Terms of Service and "expectations", rather than actual misrepresentation.

    but there ain't no laws that I can think of making anything they did actually illegal

    As hinted in TFS, "Vermont's Data Broker Law" (Act 171 of 2018) does regulate data brokers' data security procedures, so even if the "fraudulently acquiring" bit doesn't stick, they may have something on that side.

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 13 2020, @11:09PM (2 children)

      As for the first, nah. Terms of Service aren't legally binding and violating them being a breach of the CFAA has been thrown out from the bench. Expectations would be a joke. The only thing they could really get them on would be an EULA but that's civil and if they did it without logging their scraper in, there aren't any EULA violations.

      Secondly, possibly. They're going to have to prove that whoever the "broker" is is actually a broker though. From what I understood they were a third party data processor, which isn't a broker under VT laws unless they also license or sell the collected information. Yeah, I know they registered as one but that don't mean they qualify as one under this law.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @11:28AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @11:28AM (#971143)

        Whether taken in public, or in private require an actor's release from every person documented in the image?

        isn't this why the media industry always has to shut down a street and hire hundreds of extras for scenes shot out in public?

        If so, then doesn't this simply fall under commercial use of imagery without actor's releases and thus a violation of copyright law involving some sort of financial damages? If so you only need to make it into an RIAA/MPAA style copyright infringement class action lawsuit and these companies will be bankrupt, everyone including the government will be financially richer, and nobody will think twice about trying it again. It will have a 'chilling effect' on social media platforms as they will no longer be able to monetize peoples videos without releases for everyone in them, but that again just solves another problem for the rest of us who have been unwillingly published for unlicensed people's for-profit motives for almost 2 decades now. Maybe 2.5 for some of the early social media adopters.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @05:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @05:14AM (#971043)

    Then maybe disservices like Facebook also need to be illegal. Don't let the data be collected to begin with.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @08:22AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @08:22AM (#971097)

    Maybe had a dick in them in the last two hours, lets consider bladder service, not just testicle color ....

  • (Score: 2) by dry on Sunday March 15 2020, @01:55AM (3 children)

    by dry (223) on Sunday March 15 2020, @01:55AM (#971426) Journal

    Copyright? Every photograph is copyrighted with the default being the copyright belongs to the photographer.

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday March 15 2020, @03:22AM (2 children)

      They didn't produce the copies, Facebook and such did with an explicit license to. If they don't distribute the copies they scraped, they're free and clear. Frankly, they'd be free and clear anyway because they're using them very much in a transformative way, which is clearly covered by Fair Use.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 2) by dry on Sunday March 15 2020, @04:38AM (1 child)

        by dry (223) on Sunday March 15 2020, @04:38AM (#971488) Journal

        They did copy the copy hosted on Facebook, Google etc. What the licenses and terms are, I have no idea. You may well be right about fair use, but that has to be decided by a court, so this would still be an excuse to sue, and the State has more lawyers then most.