It’s time for controversial facial-recognition software company Clearview AI to face its accusers.
The Manhattan-based firm’s program “infringes the privacy and civil liberties of nearly everyone in the United States,” a 31-page class-action suit filed in Manhattan federal court May 4 charges.
Manhattanite Dean John is among those who have signed on to the suit, which demands Clearview stop “illegally” harvesting people’s photos from social media — and pay up more than $5 million in damages.
The suit alleges Clearview “covertly collected billions of personal photographs from across the internet, extracted [personal] information from them, and aggregated that data into a massive surveillance database that can identify hundreds of millions of Americans in seconds with just a picture.”
The complaint charges Clearview AI “created this dystopian dragnet without ever obtaining permission from the subjects of the images or the websites on which they were hosted.”
With clever marketing to individual police officers, the lawsuit contends that “the company soon exploded and was openly used by thousands of law enforcement agencies throughout the country, and quietly used by private industry and the well-connected.”
Gristedes supermarkets billionaire John Catsimatidis reportedly used the software to spy on his jet-setting daughter’s date at Cipriani in SoHo.
In January, The Post reported that rogue NYPD officers were using Clearview AI software on their personal phones that the department’s own
didn’t want to touch because of concerns about security and potential for abuse.
“This company’s practices are catastrophically reckless, and pose one of the gravest threats to privacy imaginable,” American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Nathan Freed Wessler, who is not involved in the litigation, told The Post. “Police should stay far away from Clearview’s insidious system, and lawmakers should put face recognition technology off limits for police once and for all.”
Clearview attorney Tor Ekeland said Clearview AI “is a public search engine that uses only publicly available images accessible to anyone with a smart phone or computer. It’s unfortunate the ACLU wants to censor what search engines people can use to access public information on the internet, and that they think the First Amendment permits this.”
