Government agencies used Clearview facial recognition in 24 countries
The company is offering its technology on a try-before-you-buy basis
Dozens of government-affiliated agencies around the world, including police departments and universities, have trialled Clearview AI's facial-recognition system, according to BuzzFeed News.
The publication reviewed internal data from Clearview and found that 88 government agencies in 24 countries (not including the USA) had used the firm's facial recognition system, as of February 2020.
The agencies included police departments, interior ministries, prosecutors' offices and universities.
According to BuzzFeed, Clearview offered its technology on a try-before-you-buy basis in Australia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, the UK and elsewhere.
The entities that trialled the system have already run more than 14,000 searches, the report claimed. In some instances, officers used the software without their superiors' knowledge or permission.
Clearview AI has come under intense scrutiny in several countries over the privacy implications of its software.
The company has created a massive database using billions of images scraped from publicly available social media profiles, including Facebook and Instagram. This database enables Clearview's customers to run facial recognition searches and identify persons of interest.
Customers submit peoples' pictures and the system tries to locate those people in the database, using facial recognition. If successful, it returns details like the individual's name, social media handles and so on to the customer.
Clearview claims its system delivers more accurate results compared to other facial recognition technologies, because it is trained on a massive database containing more than 3 billion images.
Some entities that were offered a free trial of Clearview's software are in countries where governments have now declared the use of Clearview as 'unlawful', says BuzzFeed.
In February 2021, Canada's data privacy commissioner announced that Clearview had 'violated federal and provincial privacy laws' by collecting images of Canadians. It told the firm to stop offering its services to Canadian clients, stop collecting images of Canadian people, and to delete all existing images and biometrics of those citizens.
European Union authorities are currently assessing whether the use of Clearview software in the region violated GDPR rules. Under GDPR guidelines, companies processing personal data are required to obtain the data subject's informed consent.
The EU probe was announced after privacy campaigners filed a series of legal complaints with five European regulators against Clearview in May. The campaigners alleged that the company scraped facial images of 3 billion people from the web without their knowledge or permission.
France's National Commission for Informatics and Freedoms told BuzzFeed News that it was investigating 'several complaints' about Clearview use in the country.
The Dutch Data Protection Authority said it was 'unlikely' that police agencies' use of Clearview was lawful.
In 2020, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube threatened legal action against the firm if it did not stop the practice of scraping user data from their platforms.
Clearview AI is also facing multiple privacy lawsuits in the US and elsewhere.