Clearview AI reaches a settlement with the ACLU by agreeing to stop selling or offering free access to its facial recognition database to most US businesses
The related coverage also records Clearview pursuing funding amid legal and ethical concerns, making the boundary between government-facing and private-sector sales central to its commercial path.
First-order effects
Most U.S. businesses lose the ability to buy or receive free access to Clearview's facial-recognition database under the ACLU settlement.
Clearview's immediately addressable private-sector customer base narrows, while the ACLU secures a concrete restriction on the company’s distribution of the database.
Second-order effects
Clearview's later offering of a private-sector tool allegedly built from permission-collected data becomes a more important route to business customers than access to its broader database.
Other facial-recognition vendors selling to businesses face a clearer incentive to distinguish consent-based products from databases assembled through web scraping.
Third-order effects
If litigation-driven access limits persist, commercial facial recognition is likely to segment between government-oriented systems and private products whose data provenance can withstand privacy challenges.
The trend: Privacy litigation is shaping facial-recognition competition by making dataset provenance and customer access terms core commercial constraints.
Major news from the ACLU v Clearview suit: the company is permanently banned from selling access to its facial recognition tool to US businesses + private entities. It's also banned from selling access to law enforcement in Illinois for at least 5 years https://www.aclu.org/...
New: Big Clearview AI legal settlement. No selling to private companies in U.S. No police or government sales in Illinois for 5 years. And no more free trial accounts for cops. Pretty big changes, all thanks to one privacy law in a single state https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Thanks to a groundbreaking Illinois privacy law around biometric data, and a suit by the ACLU, Clearview AI is now banned from selling our “faceprints” to most businesses across the entire country. Unfortunately, government agencies still use it. That needs to be addressed. https…
privacy regulation can seem like an impossible slog, but the largely grassroots / bottom-up battle against face recognition just scored another big win https://twitter.com/...
Illinois folks: here's your ClearviewAI #BIPA facial recognition opt-out form. https://privacyportal.onetrust.com/ ... Do it for those of us who only dream of having their biometric privacy enumerated by law. https://twitter.com/...
As part of the settlement in ACLU v. Clearview AI, the company is now permanently banned, nationwide, from making its faceprint database available to most businesses and other private actors. https://www.aclu-il.org/... https://twitter.com/...
Great. Can we have our faces back? Shouldn't Facebook now sue them despite their board member being an investor? I have questions. https://twitter.com/...
Wow, big win in ACLU v. Clearview: The facial recognition co that boasts 10 billion “face prints” is now permanently barred from selling database access to private actors across the US, thanks to a new settlement and the Illinois Biometric Privacy Law https://www.aclu.org/...
Kind of wild that Illinois, of all places, is the last stalwart of serious privacy legislation in this country. That said, this is huge. https://twitter.com/...
So Clearview and Floyd Abrams took a beating in court from the ACLU and agreed to limit use of their mass surveillance database in the U.S. But limited MAINLY to gov agencies while MOST American companies and private individuals can't access it. https://www.nytimes.com/...
The @ACLU accused Clearview AI of violating an Illinois law that bans companies from sharing faceprints, fingerprints, & other biometric data without the consent of Illinoisans. The ACLU won. Clearview now restricted from selling faceprints across the US: https://www.aclu.org/...…
The ACLU was able to get this settlement from Clearview on the basis of Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). There is still no federal law that governs the use of facial recognition in the US.
Huge #privacy news today: as a result of an @ACLU lawsuit, and to comply w/ the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, Clearview AI can no longer make its database of faceprints available to private actors, not only in IL, but across the country. https://www.aclu.org/...
There are exceptions in the settlement: -Clearview will still be able to sell its facial database to banks (under an Illinois law carveout) -Clearview can still sell its facial recognition algorithm, without the 20B+ face database, to private companies https://www.nytimes.com/...
Also this settlement applies to the US only. The company has for years talked about international expansion, despite facing strong regulators and fines abroad, and still continues to explore those options. Read more from @kashhill and me: https://www.nytimes.com/...
New: Clearview AI settles its lawsuit with the ACLU. Big takeaway: It has agreed to not provide its 20 billion+ face database to most U.S. private companies. It will still be able to do so for federal and state government agencies (outside of Illinois): https://www.nytimes.com/..…