Clearview AI to sell technology to private sector as well as government agencies - FedScoop
2022-04-04 18:51 (EST) - John Hewitt Jones
Written by John Hewitt Jones
Facial recognition technology company Clearview AI is looking to sell services to banks and other private sector companies in addition to working with government agencies.
Clearview co-founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That told the Associated Press Friday of the company’s further growth plans, responding to a recent federal court filing that suggested the company may be up for sale.
“We don’t have any plans to sell the company,” Ton-That said. According to the executive, the company is instead looking to launch an identity verification venture to compete with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft.
Clearview will look to sell a new “consent-based” product to corporate customers that would use its algorithms to verify a person’s face but would not involve its database of more than 20 billion images.
The technology company has attracted scrutiny in recent months from privacy and civil rights groups because at the core of its product is an AI platform that uses billions of images scraped from social media sites to identify people. Up until now, Clearview has worked only with governments and law enforcement agencies around the world.
In the U.S., it has notable contracts with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which on March 15 awarded a contract to Clearview for information technology components.
Other government departments that have struck contracts with Clearview include the FBI , the Department of the Army , the Air Force and the Department of Justice .
Clearview in March also started offering its services for free to the Ukrainian military , in part to help identify dead Russian soldiers using its database of about 2 billion images scraped from Russian social media.
In September last year , the company served a subpoena on a transparency nonprofit, seeking communications the group had with media in relation to scraping images and personal information from social media sites and selling data to law enforcement agencies.
Clearview subsequently withdrew the court order, after details of the subpoena became public.
Air Force , Army , Clearview AI , , , U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
