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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Clearview AI to stop selling controversial facial recognition app to private companies:
Controversial facial recognition provider Clearview AI says it will no longer sell its app to private companies and non-law enforcement entities, according to a legal filing first reported on Thursday by BuzzFeed News. It will also be terminating all contracts, regardless of whether the contracts are for law enforcement purposes or not, in the state of Illinois.
The document, filed in Illinois court as part of lawsuit over the company's potential violations of a state privacy law, lays out Clearview's decision as a voluntary action, and the company will now "avoid transacting with non-governmental customers anywhere." Earlier this year, BuzzFeed reported on a leaked client list that indicates Clearview's technology has been used by thousands of organizations, including companies like Bank of America, Macy's, and Walmart.
"Clearview is cancelling the accounts of every customer who was not either associated with law enforcement or some other federal, state, or local government department, office, or agency," Clearview's filing reads. "Clearview is also cancelling all accounts belonging to any entity based in Illinois." Clearview argues that it should not face an injunction, which would prohibit it from using current or past Illinois residents' biometric data, because it's taking these steps to comply with the state's privacy law.
Previously:
(2020-04-20) Security Lapse Exposed Clearview AI Source Code
(2020-04-18) Some Shirts Hide You from Cameras
(2020-03-13) Vermont Sues Clearview, Alleging "Oppressive, Unscrupulous" Practices
(2020-02-28) Clearview AI's Facial Recognition Tech is Being Used by US Justice Department, ICE, and the FBI
(2020-02-26) Clearview AI Reports Entire Client List Was Stolen
(2020-02-24) Canadian Privacy Commissioners to Investigate "Creepy" Facial Recognition Firm Clearview AI
(2020-02-06) Clearview AI Hit with Cease-And-Desist from Google, Facebook Over Facial Recognition Collection
(2020-01-22) Clearview App Lets Strangers Find Your Name, Info with Snap of a Photo, Report Says
Senator fears Clearview AI facial recognition could be used on protesters:
Sen. Edward Markey has raised concerns that police and law enforcement agencies have access to controversial facial recognition app Clearview AI in cities where people are protesting the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died two weeks ago while in the custody of Minneapolis police.
[...] "As demonstrators across the country exercise their First Amendment rights by protesting racial injustice, it is important that law enforcement does not use technological tools to stifle free speech or endanger the public," Markey said in a letter to Clearview AI CEO and co-founder Hoan Ton-That.
The threat of surveillance could also deter people from "speaking out against injustice for fear of being permanently included in law enforcement databases," he said.
Markey, who has previously hammered Clearview AI over its sales to foreign governments, use by domestic law enforcement and use in the COVID-19 pandemic, is now asking the company for a list of law enforcement agencies that have signed new contracts since May 25, 2020.
It's also being asked if search traffic on its database has increased during the past two weeks; whether it considers a law enforcement agency's "history of unlawful or discriminatory policing practices" before selling the technology to them; what process it takes to give away free trials; and whether it will prohibit its technology from being used to identify peaceful protestors.
[...] Ton-That said he will respond to the letter from Markey. "Clearview AI's technology is intended only for after-the-crime investigations, and not as a surveillance tool relating to protests or under any other circumstances," he said in an emailed statement.
Previously:
AWS Facial Recognition Platform Misidentified Over 100 Politicians As Criminals:
Comparitech's Paul Bischoff found that Amazon's facial recognition platform misidentified an alarming number of people, and was racially biased.
Facial recognition technology is still misidentifying people at an alarming rate – even as it's being used by police departments to make arrests. In fact, Paul Bischoff, consumer privacy expert with Comparitech, found that Amazon's face recognition platform incorrectly misidentified more than 100 photos of US and UK lawmakers as criminals.
Rekognition, Amazon's cloud-based facial recognition platform that was first launched in 2016, has been sold and used by a number of United States government agencies, including ICE and Orlando, Florida police, as well as private entities. In comparing photos of a total of 1,959 US and UK lawmakers to subjects in an arrest database, Bischoff found that Rekognition misidentified at average of 32 members of Congress. That's four more than a similar experiment conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) – two years ago. Bischoff also found that the platform was racially biased, misidentifying non-white people at a higher rate than white people.
These findings have disturbing real-life implications. Last week, the ACLU shed light on Detroit citizen Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, who was arrested after a facial recognition system falsely matched his photo with security footage of a shoplifter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @09:36PM (3 children)
How is that facial recognition working out for all the pron you must have scraped up? I mean there is so much of it on the 'net that you could hardly avoid having a great collection.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @10:04PM (2 children)
AI has taken up breast recognition as hobby.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 13 2020, @10:07PM (1 child)
Pffft, big deal, babies can do that.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday March 15 2020, @01:50AM
Babies zero in on nipples and don't really care about who it is connected to. My son was always trying to suck on my non-existent breast and wet nursing has a long tradition as babies don't care about whose nipple they're sucking on.
(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.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @10:51PM (3 children)
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.
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)
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: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 14 2020, @01:33PM
A) Depends on the state.
B) Not at all if they're not published.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @05:14AM
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
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)
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)
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.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday March 15 2020, @10:38AM
Nope, Facebook made a copy to send to their computer to display, same as they do for every visitor. That at least is thoroughly settled case law.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 13 2020, @10:07PM (4 children)
If there is a God, He, She, It should push this idea out to all the states, and on out to all the nations on earth. Privacy - what a concept.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday March 14 2020, @12:24AM (3 children)
I really think privacy is permanently compromised. There's just too much stored data about everyone. Rather than try to restore lost privacy, it may be better work on getting society to be more accepting. As the famous Cardinal Richelieu said:
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
The answer is not to prevent those six lines from reaching the public, it is to stop the hangings.
For example, one thing people do an awful lot more of than is generally accepted or still even realized, is sexual infidelity. Now, however, paternity tests are easy and cheap. That kind of skeleton is a lot, lot harder to keep in the closet. Society has come around somewhat. Just being a bastard, in the old sense of being of illegitimate parentage, doesn't carry the social stigma it once did. That Scarlet Letter crap may have been plausible 4 centuries ago, but I should hope the power and numbers of the remaining puritanical prudes are so greatly reduced that these days, they have no chance of making such a punishment stick or sting. Provided, that is, that they are not aided by privacy laws in being allowed to practice their particular brand of oppression in secrecy, dressing the matter up as religious freedom whenever anything is exposed.
Another blow to privacy was brought to us by the police. They didn't want to be videoed while working. And why? They couldn't give a good reason that stood up to the least bit of scrutiny. They didn't have a good reason. It quickly emerged that the real reason was so they could continue to get away with abusing their power, of course. Their loss of privacy on the job has been a clear public benefit.
Cockroaches don't like sunlight. Loss of privacy will make those unfair backroom deals and election and bid riggings far harder to arrange. And that's a good thing.
Still, privacy has a place, in that the law is far from perfect, and is violated all the time, with no harm done. Indeed, the greater harm would be if it was impossible to violate the law. In a medical emergency, it's better to break the speed limit than lose a limb, or a life. Then there's the crazy Intellectual Property laws. Another problem is severely antiquated law. A lot of law is politically motivated and not a good idea, stuff such as Prohibition. And, laws about sexual conduct, such as anti-sodomy statues.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday March 14 2020, @12:45AM (1 child)
I can't argue any of your points.
What I will argue is, that any agency, government or private, has some right to harvest all the data on all of the citizens, everywhere. The databases, for the most part, shouldn't exist. Those that are considered to be necessary should be very tightly controlled.
You mention intellectual property? Funny, that the private citizen owns no property, but corporations own all the property. The corp can harvest my data, and yours, then claim some IP rights to that very data. It's almost like the corporation owns me? I outright reject that idea.
It's time for a new generation of philosopher/lawyer/personal rights sort of thinker to come forward, to define boundaries on the collection and use of personal data. Permitting the corporates to define right and wrong can't possibly end well.
We already have laws meant to protect the privacy of children, but those laws are mostly meaningless. Those cameras on the streets of $City are recording the children, right along with the less protected adults. Clearview scans children's Facebook pages just as readily as they scan any adult pages.
Whatever, I'll continue to fight the good fight, to the extent of my ability. Much of my online activity is simply not tracked. Much more of it is still difficult to track. And, whenever possible, I poison the well.
The real problem is, the number of people who still have no idea how pervasive surveillance is. Start with all the idiots who post their life experience to Facebook, for everyone to see.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @05:24AM
More problematic: Start with all the idiots who post other people's (e.g. their children's) life experiences and data to Facebook, for everyone to see.
When I grew up, disservices like Facebook did not exist, so my parents never had an opportunity to compromise my privacy in such a way. I am a staunch advocate of privacy rights, and had my parents surrendered all my data to mega-corporations like so many parents do today, I would be furious.
I would hate to be a kid growing up today, especially one concerned about privacy like I am. Posting your kid's information and photos online like so many do definitely needs to be illegal.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @05:17AM
Let's do both. But given the tendency of people to ostracize and bully others for little to no reason, the latter might be a pipe dream.
Mass surveillance necessarily threatens democracy. [gnu.org] We must prevent the data from being collected to begin with, wherever possible. Business models like Facebook's should be illegal, period.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @01:30AM (1 child)
Vermont granted a license to break the law?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @03:16AM
Data Breaker