Report on Supply Chain Compliance 3, no. 3 (February 6, 2020)
A New York Times article[1] blew open the work of Clearview AI, an artificial intelligence start-up that claims to be helping law enforcement agencies solve crimes using facial recognition technology. The article used research from MuckRock[2] and Open the Government[3] —organizations that have collected information on the technology and the agencies supposedly using the software. Another report, by Buzzfeed News, [4] dug deeper into Clearview’s claims and found that many of the relationships with law enforcement agencies were exaggerated or fabricated.
Nevertheless, the claims of the company and its technology pose significant risks for data privacy. The technology is supposedly able to scrape photos from the internet, store them in a database and find matches for any photo. Clearview claims to have at least 3 billion photos. Regardless of the legality of scraping photos from online platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter,[5] the software’s abilities appear to be feasible.
Taken together with a previous New York Times report on geolocation and privacy,[6] the outlook for data privacy appears grim. Calls[7] for a federal, if not global, regulatory framework to protect privacy have grown louder since the GDPR[8] and CCPA[9] became law. So far, the United States Congress has resisted those calls.