YouTube and Facebook send cease-and-desist letters to Clearview AI over photo scraping after a similar move by Twitter in January
With Authoritarian Regimes James Hale / Tubefilter : YouTube Sends Cease-And-Desist To Facial Recognition Company That Scrapes Social Media Images For Law Enforcement Tristan Greene / The Next Web : Facial recognition company CEO says he doesn't need permission to use your face Tweets: @rmac18 : New: Facebook has demanded that Clearview AI stop scraping its photos. A Facebook spox: “Scraping people's information violates our policies, which is why we've demanded that Clearview stop accessing or using information from Facebook or Instagram.” Caroline Haskins / @carolineha_ : SCOOP: A map I got via FOIL shows that Clearview AI is trying to expand globally. The map highlights 22 countries, including Canada, Colombia, Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, parts of the EU, UAE, Qatar, Singapore, & Australia https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... @rmac18 : Facebook has sent multiple letters to Clearview, asking them to cease and desist from using any data, images or media from Instagram or FB. https://www.buzzfeed.com/... @buzzfeednews : Update: Facebook told BuzzFeed News that it has “demanded that Clearview stop accessing or using information from Facebook or Instagram.” Facebook board member Peter Thiel is an investor in Clearview. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... @rmac18 : Our latest: While pitching to cops, Clearview bragged about its international expansion to places like Qatar and the UAE. When we asked them about those plans, which were obtained by records request, Clearview's CEO declined to give specifics. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Jeff Roberts / @jeffjohnroberts : Nice gesture by YouTube but cease-and-desist letters won't do shit to stop mass harvesting of facial data. We need real privacy laws and a DOJ willing to enforce them. https://twitter.com/... Fabio Chiusi / @fabiochiusi : “Clearview AI's founder intends to challenge the cease-and-desist letters from Google and Twitter, arguing that he has a constitutional right to harvest people's public photos” https://twitter.com/... Kashmir Hill / @kashhill : Google and YouTube have now also sent Clearview cease-and-desist letters but it sounds like the company does not plan to cease nor desist. Hoan Ton-That says Clearview is just doing what Google does, but for faces. https://www.cbsnews.com/... Evan Greer / @evan_greer : this is cool and all, but we're just playing whack-a-mole until Congress does their jobs and passes meaningful data privacy legislation and a ban on facial recognition surveillance https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter opened this front in January with its own cease-and-desist over photo scraping; within days YouTube followed (serving Clearview a letter of its own), and Facebook has now demanded the company stop accessing or using Facebook and Instagram data entirely. The platforms are moving as a bloc because Clearview's search product — sold to law enforcement — is built on their users' faces.
Clearview's founder has said publicly he will challenge and refuse to comply with the letters, claiming a right to harvest public photos. That refusal is what turns a terms-of-service dispute into a test case over where the permission boundary around public data actually sits.
First-order effects
- Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are cutting off Clearview's largest single source of training and search images at the source, directly threatening the database its police customers query.
- Clearview must now defend its harvesting practice against simultaneous demands from multiple platform owners while keeping law enforcement clients served.
Second-order effects
- With compliance refused, enforcement migrates from private letters to courts and filings: the ACLU's Illinois lawsuit over scraped and sold photos arrives months later, and Clearview responds by canceling client accounts not tied to law enforcement or government to shrink its exposure.
- Other platforms face the same choice Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook made — send their own letters or be seen as tacit suppliers to a police surveillance product.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the 'public photo means consent' position loses ground to explicit permission regimes, pushing platforms from legal notices toward technical enforcement — a path YouTube extends in 2024 with AI detection tools and planned scraping controls.
- The standoff sketches the structure of the coming fight over likeness governance: startups assembling scraped biometric databases versus platforms and civil-society litigants defining who may index faces, with regulators watching how far each side pushes.
The trend: Platform control over scraped facial data is escalating from cease-and-desist letters into litigation and built-in scraping defenses, defining the permission boundary for biometric databases built on public web content.