"Clearview’s Terrifying Facial Recognition Can’t Go Back in the Bottle", 6 February 2020

[H]alf a dozen big tech companies have now demanded that Clearview AI... [a company] that has scraped more than 3 billion images of people from millions of websites, stop using their data... [Investigation by The New York] Times found that the company has been marketing its powerful facial recognition tool to law enforcement for the last few years... 

... [The] immediate react to the report was: Facial-recognition technology should be banned... The week after the report came out, Twitter sent a cease-and-desist letter to the company ordering it to stop mining the social media platform’s data and delete anything it had already collected... Google, its subsidiary YouTube, and Venmno sent their own cease-and-desist letters, and LinkedIn told BuzzFeed on Thursday that it had done the same. Facebook notably has not sent a formal cease-and-desist letter but claims to have sent other letters to Clearview to request more detail on its practices and then eventually “demanded” that it stop scraping user data... [Hon Ton-That, app developer and co founder of Clearview said] “You have to remember that this is only used for investigations after the fact. This is not a 24/7 surveillance system.”