Discovered the company stores 3 billion photos as 'materials' for the facial recognition tool, raising privacy concerns

The global debate over the benefits and harms of governments and law enforcement's face recognition technology has once again become fierce and at a much higher level. many, after the New York Times published a relatively detailed article about a rather strange company, which provides facial recognition services to about 600 law enforcement agencies in the United States, and it's worth mentioning. is that the company is holding an image database 7 times larger than the FBI's photo library - which raises big questions about the legality of using personal data and the infringement of rights private.

This is one of the companies sponsored by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, named Clearview AI and operates in the field of face recognition services from images stored in the current database. contains about three billion photos of it. The problem is that these photos have been scanned from millions of websites, including Facebook, YouTube and Venmo - with or without user consent.

In addition to having a huge database in hand, Clearview AI also boasts face matching technology even when the source of comparison data is imperfect photos, i.e. taken in hidden corners or from above (for example, from a surveillance camera). The tool is said to be able to transplant faces with an accuracy of about 75%, and has actually contributed to quite a few cases, helping the police to track down suspects. But the worry here is that this tool has never been tested and tested by any independent party before it was provided to the police force.

This clearly makes it impossible for activists to protect personal privacy, especially when facial recognition and photo-gathering technologies without the owner's permission are showing signs of output. Now increasingly popular. 'There needs to be strong involvement from lawmakers, not only in the United States but everywhere in the world. Personal privacy is a minimum that must be respected, 'said Al Gidari, a professor of privacy at Stanford Law School.