from the everything-everywhere-all-at-once dept
Clearview saw an opening in the facial recognition market and took full advantage of it. While most tech firms offered face-matching tech of dubious accuracy, Clearview went further, matching its AI to the billions of records it has harvested for free from the open internet. (And while this effort certainly wasn’t free, it definitely was cheaper than hiring a third party to do its web scraping for it.)
Not satisfied with its 10 billion+ stack of scraped photos and personal data, Clearview turned to other companies to help it continue to build a database none of its competitors would be able to compete with. (Not that any of them wanted to compete with Clearview. In fact, other facial recognition tech companies have taken care to distance themselves from Clearview and its web scraping-based business model.)
As Freddy Martinez reports for 404 Media, newly obtained documents show Clearview was willing to spend some of its own money to obtain (or at least access) more than a billion additional data points from a third party “intelligence firm.”
New documents obtained by 404 Media reveal that Clearview AI spent nearly a million dollars in a bid to purchase “690 million arrest records and 390 million arrest photos” from all 50 states from an intelligence firm. The contract further describes the records as including current and former home addresses, dates of birth, arrest photos, social security and cell phone numbers, and email addresses. Clearview attempted to purchase this data from Investigative Consultant, Inc. (ICI) which billed itself as an intelligence company with access to tens of thousands of databases and the ability to create unique data streams for its clients. The contract was signed in mid-2019, at a time when Clearview AI was quietly collecting billions of photos off the internet and was relatively unknown at the time.
As the report notes, this happened before Clearview began racking up negative headlines all over the world, thanks mostly to Kashmir Hill’s expose of the company and it tactics (and its miserable set of financial backers) for the New York Times. This was prior to the numerous lawsuits, fines, fees, and expulsions from foreign countries that initial reporting led to.
That also means this happened back when Clearview still had money to spend. At this point, Clearview still has tens of billions of data points and an unknown number of paying customers, but it hardly seems like a tech firm that’s likely to survive much longer now that its largest revenue stream is considered so toxic most potential customers are look at other options. In fact, Clearview is so cash poor it has been trying to hand out stock options instead of actual money in lawsuit settlements.
Clearview — especially as portrayed by its founder, Hoan Ton-That — depicts itself as the fastest mover in the breaking things tech market, a company so smart and self-assured that it can’t possibly be overtaken by its competitors and/or forced out of the market by the numerous laws around the world that make its data collection efforts illegal.
But the evidence shows Clearview isn’t all that smart, actually. This contract fell through and both parties sued each other for breach of contract. This ended up being one of the rare cases where Clearview came out ahead in litigation. But if it had any hope of clawing back the ~$1 million it paid to ICI, those hopes were extinguished more than five years ago when Clearview first entered this contract.
Clearview AI may also never recover the over one million dollars from ICI or its president: instead of wiring the money to an escrow service, Clearview instead deposited it directly into Berlin’s personal checking account.
Nice. This makes Clearview look like someone’s grandparent. Maybe Clearview was told things would move faster if it just cut a check to cash and sent it to ICI’s owner directly. Or maybe ICI managed to nullify the contractual prenup by convincing Clearview no escrow would be necessary. Either way, Clearview got played and the money it wants back from the company was never paid directly to this data broker/”intelligence firm.” Instead, it went directly into the pocket of the company’s president (Donald Berlin) who may not have any legal, much less moral, compunction to return the funds.
This feels like another mileage marker on the road to Clearview’s ultimate exit from the marketplace of… um… marketplaces. At this point, it’s just limping along, selling access to entities that don’t mind doing business with a business on the precipice of bankruptcy and don’t really care where the data come from or the accuracy of the algorithm used to generate matches. And while I sincerely continue to cheer on what looks like a slow-moving demise of a truly terrible AI firm, I’m not so optimistic some other tech bro with even worse ideas won’t buy what’s left of this mess for pennies on the dollar and turn into something far worse than what it already is.
Filed Under: facial recognition tech, privacy, surveillance, web scraping
Companies: clearview, clearview ai, investigative consultant inc.
