Leaked pitch deck: Clearview AI told investors that it will have 100B facial photos in its database within a year, after growing to 10B+ since early 2020
because Congress is doing NOTHING to stop this — that it can get away with everything. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Will Oremus / @willoremus : In the absence of regulation, giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook stepping back from face recognition and face-based surveillance is not progress: It's just a golden business opportunity for even less scrupulous firms like Clearview AI. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
The pitch matters because it is aimed at capital, not regulators — the deck treats the retreat of the big platforms as a moat rather than a rebuke, positioning Clearview as the unscrupulous inheritor of a market the scrupulous abandoned.
First-order effects
Investors are being sold a 10x database-growth target on top of a customer base already spanning hundreds of US police agencies, meaning the immediate effect is more funding flowing into scraping-based surveillance capacity.
Law-enforcement users gain a rapidly expanding search corpus whose scale — and the deblurring and mask-removal capabilities built alongside it — outpaces anything the retreating big-tech products ever offered.
Second-order effects
The platform giants' withdrawal hands pricing power and market share to firms willing to scrape without consent, so each new ethics-driven exit by Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Facebook functions as customer acquisition for Clearview-style vendors.
With no federal constraint, expansion follows the money beyond policing — a path the related coverage confirms when Clearview later markets its tool to private companies and organizations, not just government agencies.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, the US settles into a two-tier face-recognition market: responsible incumbents self-restrict while unconstrained specialists absorb demand, making the legislative void itself the industry's core competitive asset.
By 2023 the company reports running nearly 1M searches for US police against 30B scraped images, suggesting the structural endpoint is consent-free biometric indexing of the public web becoming normalized infrastructure unless Congress acts — the exact outcome the Post's framing warns against.
The trend: In the absence of US facial-recognition legislation, surveillance capability is migrating from self-restraining platform giants to specialist firms whose growth rate is set by scraping speed rather than regulation.
Scoop: I got Clearview AI's big new pitch to investors. The facial recognition giant wants to work with private companies in retail and the gig economy. And with $50 million, they said they can get to 100 billion faces, enough to identify everyone on earth https://www.washingtonp…
Failing to deal with this company's behavior when it started is the biggest public policy failure in the digital space in a generation. Reining it in is that much tougher now that it's well-funded and so frequently used by government clients. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... @…
Especially considering how the real ClearviewAI endgame is SCOTUS showdown where surveillance is declared protected speech under 1A à la Citizens United https://twitter.com/...
Though it's weird that a FB board member supported this startup pretty early on when its business mode depended on scraping Facebook data over Facebook's mild protest. Here, strangely, is that person warning about this surveillance, having invested in it. https://www.cnbc.com/...
Dear Members if Congress: This means the media and opponents will always know everywhere you are, anywhere you go. How about a comprehensive federal privacy bill? https://twitter.com/...
One of three Peter Thiel backed companies which should be shut down as it's toxic to the world. AGs should be demanding the source and legal basis for every image. Let's see how many are scraped legally particularly from Facebook. https://twitter.com/...
Clearview compares itself to Chinese, Israeli & Russian face-scan firms. Common U.S. tech refrain: If we don't do it, the other guys will. The nationalist argument is bizarre, @_jack_poulson says: We have “to out-surveil China to protect civil liberties”? https://www.washingtonpo…
This thread is a perfect summary of the remarkable failure to regulate Clearview AI and how it's only going to get harder to do so from here. https://twitter.com/...
They bragged about being racist, we're funded by a racist And a big part of the “policy” failure was that folks didn't want to look into because of their belief people talking about racism in tech wasn't important When policy owns that then we'll do something https://twitter.com/…
there's a lot of competition but “if we don't make facial recognition equipped robo murder dogs then CHINA will beat us to it” is hands down the most bullshit industry talking point https://twitter.com/...
Don't think you have autonomy when you are anywhere outside a private residence (& sometimes not even then). Companies make money using and identifying your likeness. Yet few laws address this. https://twitter.com/...
Clearview AI is one of the most evil companies around: It's relentlessly dismantling what's left of privacy. And it believes — because Congress is doing NOTHING to stop this — that it can get away with everything. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Lee Wolosky, the 9/11 lawyer who also worked in the White House on Afghanistan that @lhfang and @ryangrim just wrote about, was also named to the board of Clearview AI last year https://twitter.com/...
Clearview AI is pure evil but it's built upon the surveillance capitalist foundation established by Google and Facebook. Failing to stop that destructive business model was the biggest public policy failure in the digital space in a generation. https://twitter.com/...
And it's not just a private effort, but a tiny private effort. If Microsoft or Facebook or IBM or Amazon had pulled this there'd be immediate outcry across the board, from the public and from competitors. That's in part why they didn't try!
This week, a federal judge “rejected Clearview's First Amendment defense, denied the company's motion to dismiss, and allowed the lawsuits to move forward. This is an important victory for our privacy over Clearview's profits.”🇺🇸👏 https://www.eff.org/...
A federal judge has allowed cases to proceed against Clearview's faceprinting of billions of people without their consent. This is a big victory for everyone's biometric privacy. https://www.eff.org/...
In the absence of regulation, giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook stepping back from face recognition and face-based surveillance is not progress: It's just a golden business opportunity for even less scrupulous firms like Clearview AI. https://www.washingtonpost.c…