USA: NGO sues facial recognition firm Clearview AI for violating privacy through data mining activities
"A.C.L.U. Accuses Clearview AI of Privacy ‘Nightmare Scenario,'" 28 May 2020
…[T]he A.C.L.U. said that Clearview violated a state law that forbids companies from using a resident’s fingerprints or face scans without consent.
…According to the A.C.L.U. suit, “Clearview has set out to do what many companies have intentionally avoided out of ethical concerns: create a mass database of billions of face prints of people, including millions of Illinoisans, entirely unbeknownst to those people, and offer paid access…to private and governmental actors.”
…“Clearview AI is a search engine that uses only publicly available images accessible on the internet,” Tor Ekeland, a lawyer for Clearview, said in a statement. “It is absurd that the A.C.L.U. wants to censor which search engines people can use to access public information on the internet.”
…The A.C.L.U. said the lawsuit would compel a facial recognition company to answer to groups representing sexual assault survivors, undocumented immigrants and other vulnerable communities uniquely harmed by surveillance.…[a study] found that most commercial facial recognition systems exhibited bias, falsely identifying African-American and Asian faces 10 to 100 times more than Caucasian faces.
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