McHenry: Clearview's Facial Recognition Tool Raises Serious Privacy and Public Safety Concerns
Ranking Republican calls for details on Clearview’s catalog of faces, reportedly containing more than three billion images
Washington,
January 29, 2020 -
Republican Leader of the House Financial Services Committee Patrick McHenry (NC-10) is seeking answers from Clearview AI, following concerning reports that the company has developed a facial recognition tool based on a collection of images of people’s faces scraped from the internet, including “employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and even Venmo.”
In a letter to the company’s founder, the Ranking Member requested information relating to Clearview’s technology and data collection practices, with an emphasis on how those practices are applied to users of mobile payment services and peer-to-peer networks. In a second letter to the Chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee, Maxine Waters (CA-43), McHenry requested a hearing to assess the privacy and national security risks related to the software and to determine if the tool violates the federal Constitution or existing state biometric and privacy laws.
Read the full text of the letter to Clearview and Chairwoman Waters.
According to The New York Times, Clearview developed a facial recognition tool based on a collection of images of people’s faces scraped from the internet, including “employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and even Venmo.” Clearview provided the tool to “hundreds” of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, in addition to corporate security firms. The tool may also be compatible with augmented-reality glasses, potentially allowing users “to identify every person they saw.”
Clearview’s business model appears to rely on scraping images from mobile payment services and peer-to-peer networks, among other sources. If true, Clearview’s tool raises serious privacy and public safety concerns. We are writing to request documents and information that will help us better understand the implications of Clearview’s facial recognition product.
Technology industry leaders condemned facial recognition products such as the one developed by Clearview. In 2011, for example, former CEO Eric Schmidt stated Google withheld facial recognition technology because the company feared such capabilities could be used “in a very bad way.” Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube prohibit companies from scraping user data from their platforms. Twitter banned the use of its data for facial recognition purposes.
In addition to violating industry norms and company privacy policies, Clearview’s tool has not been tested by an independent party, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency that rates the performance of facial recognition algorithms. According to Clare Garvie, a researcher at Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology, “The larger the database, the larger the risk of misidentification because of the doppelgänger effect. [Clearview is] talking about a massive database of random people they’ve found on the internet.”
Clearview’s catalog of faces reportedly contains more than three billion images. There is no recourse for people whose images have been scraped by Clearview. According to The New York Times, “The company keeps all the images it has scraped even if they are later deleted or taken down” by the user.
Despite these specific deficiencies related to Clearview’s product and general concerns about facial recognition technology, the company adopted the position that its software “do[es] not violate the federal Constitution or relevant existing state biometric and privacy laws when using Clearview for its intended purpose.”
Sincerely,
Patrick McHenry
Ranking Member
Read more in Login on Axios here.
