AI is coming to steal your face

Clearview says its facial recognition technology is invaluable in the fight against crime. Critics warn that it violates citizens’ rights

croll through its promotional material and Clearview AI, a plucky New York start-up on a mission to “disrupt crime”, sounds like magic. Got a grainy CCTV image of a bad guy doing a bad thing? Screengrab his face, check it against the more than ten billion images of faces that Clearview has scraped from the open web, and if there is a match, its algorithm will find it in seconds.

Mystery bad man might be John Smith, who happened to attend, say, a birthday party that was memorialised in countless Instagram photos, where he is helpfully tagged by friends. Bad guy gets caught. Everybody wins.

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