Facial Recognition Company Clearview Lied About Its Crime-Solving Power In Pitches To Law Enforcement Agencies
from the just-the-alternative-facts,-ma'am dept
A very questionable facial recognition tool being offered to law enforcement was recently exposed by Kashmir Hill for the New York Times. Clearview — created by a developer previously best known for an app that let people put Trump’s “hair” on their own photos — is being pitched to law enforcement agencies as a better AI solution for all their “who TF is this guy” problems.
Clearview doesn’t limit itself to law enforcement databases — ones (partially) filled with known criminals and arrestees. Instead of using known quantities, Clearview scrapes the internet for people’s photos. With the click of an app button, officers are connected to Clearview’s stash of 3 billion photos pulled from public feeds on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Most of the scrapees have already objected to being scraped. While this may violate terms of service, it’s not completely settled that scraping content from public feeds is actually illegal. However, peeved companies can attempt to shut off their firehoses, which is what Twitter is in the process of doing.
Clearview has made some bold statements about its effectiveness — statements that haven’t been independently confirmed. Clearview did not submit its software to NIST’s recent roundup of facial recognition AI, but it most likely would not have fared well. Even more established software performed poorly, misidentifying minorities almost 100 times more often than it did white males.
The company claims it finds matches 75% of the time. That doesn’t actually mean it finds the right person 75% of the time. It only means the software finds someone that matches submitted photos three-quarters of the time. Clearview has provided no stats on its false positive rate. That hasn’t stopped it from lying about its software and its use by law enforcement agencies.
A BuzzFeed report based on public records requests and conversations with the law enforcement agencies says the company’s sales pitches are about 75% bullshit.
Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that says it’s amassed a database of billions of photos, has a fantastic selling point it offers up to police departments nationwide: It cracked a case of alleged terrorism in a New York City subway station last August in a matter of seconds. “How a Terrorism Suspect Was Instantly Identified With Clearview,” read the subject line of a November email sent to law enforcement agencies across all 50 states through a crime alert service, suggesting its technology was integral to the arrest.
Here’s what the NYPD had to say about Clearview’s claims in its marketing materials:
“The NYPD did not use Clearview technology to identify the suspect in the August 16th rice cooker incident,” a department spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “The NYPD identified the suspect using the Department’s facial recognition practice where a still image from a surveillance video was compared to a pool of lawfully possessed arrest photos.”
The NYPD also said it had no “institutional relationship” with Clearview, contradicting the company’s sales pitch insinuations. The NYPD was not alone in its rejection of Clearview’s claims.
Clearview also claimed to be instrumental in apprehending a suspect wanted for assault. In reality, the suspect turned himself in to the NYPD. The PD again pointed out Clearview played no role in this investigation. It also had nothing to do with solving a subway groping case (the tip that resulted in an arrest was provided to the NYPD by the Guardian Angels) or an alleged “40 cold cases solved” by the NYPD.
The company says it is “working with” over 600 police departments. But BuzzFeed’s investigation has uncovered at least two cases where “working with” simply meant submitting a lead to a PD tip line. Most likely, this is only the tip of the iceberg. As more requested documents roll in, there’s a very good chance this “working with” BS won’t just be a two-off.
Clearview’s background appears to be as shady as its public claims. In addition to its founder’s links to far right groups (first uncovered by Kashmir Hill), its founder pumped up the company’s reputation by deploying a bunch of sock puppets.
Ton-That set up fake LinkedIn profiles to run ads about Clearview, boasting that police officers could search over 1 billion faces in less than a second.
These are definitely not the ethics you want to see from a company pitching dubious facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies. Some agencies may perform enough due diligence to move forward with a more trustworthy company, but others will be impressed with the lower cost and the massive amount of photos in Clearview’s database and move forward with unproven software created by a company that appears to be willing to exaggerate its ability to help cops catch crooks.
If it can’t tell the truth about its contribution to law enforcement agencies, it’s probably not telling the truth about the software’s effectiveness. If cops buy into Clearview’s PR pitches, the collateral damage will be innocent people’s freedom.
Filed Under: ai, facial recognition, law enforcement, lies, scraping
Companies: clearview, clearview ai
Comments on “Facial Recognition Company Clearview Lied About Its Crime-Solving Power In Pitches To Law Enforcement Agencies”
Just because its there doesn't mean you should use it
I can understand using law enforcement photo databases, those are public records and in theory in the public domain. Using social media photos is a different story, Those photos were taken by someone, presumably not law enforcement, and that photo taker owns a copyright on that photo. While it is unlikely that many of those social media photos had the extra step taken to register them with the copyright office, they are still copyrighted. Just where does Clearview get off using other peoples IP for commercial purposes? I see an opportunity here, expect a bunch of social media photos being presented to the copyright office for registration.
Re: Just because its there doesn't mean you should use it
But you know these company’s, and even the police will use anything YOU put out there in public, including your DNA from something like 23 and Me. You put that stuff out there, it’s out of your hands and out of your control.
Re: Just because its there doesn't mean you should use it
I firmly believe that in terms of copyright and fair use, there is no legal difference between using Clearview to search for information about someone, vs. hiring an investigator who performs a reverse image search on Google to find their Facebook account. The only difference is the quality of the algorithm and the amount of human guidance it requires.
Re: Re: Just because its there doesn't mean you should use it
I think there is a pretty clear distinction — Clearview isn’t searching for the images online, it’s searching for them on its own internal database. Which means these photos have been copied from the original location and included as part of their application, and are then being distributed to various law enforcement departments. IMO it’s more like the difference between sending a link to a song on YouTube vs downloading that song and uploading it to a torrent site. In the end it could be the same people getting the same content, but one way is legal and the other is not.
Re: Re: Re: Just because its there doesn't mean you should use i
Do you mean, perhaps, like how Google (and especially relevantly, The Internet Archive) cache images, and even entire pages, so that it can display thumbnails or snippets when you search for them?
Re: Re: Re:2 Just because its there doesn't mean you should u
Unlike Clearview, neither Google or the Internet Archive make money off of the cached images. In both cases the cached images are searchable for free.
Re: Re: Re:3 Just because its there doesn't mean you shou
They do, indirectly. As does Clearview.
Clearview is not selling the images. It is selling a method of finding information which is connected to the images.
Google is not selling the images. It is selling ads that it displays around the images.
A fairer, more obvious comparison may be made to the company that recently lost a lawsuit over selling access to searchable text transcripts that were automatically generated from TV broadcasts.
absolutely gobsmacked! how could any company do such a thing, just to get money??
Re: Re:
LOL! Are you even kidding me? Corporate malfeasance is everywhere. Read more Techdirt.
Perfect
Combine this with predictive software the courts are using and we are well on the way to managing pre-crime.
Shitty facial recognition sw is scarier that good
The more error prone the algorithm and the bigger the pool of photos the higher the likelihood you’ll be flagged as a possible match. In spite of the bad smell, Clearview AI is getting a lot of good press
The idea that technology can’t sove social problems is not new. Technology only provides the means for people to amplify their attitudes that created the social problems in the first place. You could equally apply this to anything including firearms. In Finland, for example, people own firearms and even silencers are legal.
What is the difference between the US and Finland? In Finland, the government addresses sovial problems, In the US, people want the quickest, cheapest bandaid they can be sold and consider the social problems to be nothing but academic bullshit being pushed by greedy academics looking for grants. Corporations seeking profits have a lot more money than researchers to infulence lawmakers and corporations play on the predjudices that are responsible for the social problems to sell their products.
Very dubious credentials.
I smell a lawsuit – in fact, did I see something, somewhere about such a thing? Nah…..must have dreamed it. Couldn’t possibly be a crooked company with BS ideals a bit like Trump.