Lawmakers Warn Clearview AI Could End Public Anonymity if Feds Don’t Ditch It

Democratic lawmakers are ratcheting up efforts to restrict the federal authorities’s work with infamous surveillance agency Clearview AI. In a sequence of letters addressed to the Departments of Justice, Defense, Homeland Security, and the Interior on Wednesday, the lawmakers referred to as on the businesses to finish their use of the corporate’s tech, arguing the instruments “pose a serious threat to the public’s civil liberties and privacy rights.” The businesses named within the letters have been all recognized in a Government Accountability Office report launched final yr as having used Clearview AI instruments in home legislation enforcement actions.

The letters have been co-signed by 4 progressive politicians, Sens. Ed Markey and Jeff Merkley and Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Ayanna Pressley. In their letter to the DHS, the lawmakers claimed Clearview AI’s tech—which reportedly depends on a database of greater than 4 billion faces, lots of that are scraped from the open web—may successfully get rid of the notion of public anonymity if left unchecked.

“In conjunction with the company’s facial recognition capabilities, this trove of personal information is capable of fundamentally dismantling Americans’ expectation that they can move, assemble, or simply appear in public without being identified,” the lawmakers wrote.

Clearview AI’s partnerships with authorities businesses are of specific concern, the authors argued, as a result of a public that believes they’re being surveilled by their authorities could also be much less more likely to interact in civic discourse or different actions protected by the First Amendment. The lawmakers went on to specific issues over facial recognition’s “unique threats to marginalized communities,” citing earlier research displaying how the expertise performs worse when making an attempt to establish folks with darker complexions and Black women particularly.

In an emailed assertion to Gizmodo, Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That stated a National Institute of Standards and Technology test of the corporate’s tech “shows no detectable racial bias,” and stated he wasn’t conscious of any occasion the place Clearview AI’s expertise has resulted in a wrongful arrest. In his assertion, Ton-That pointed to data from the Innocence Project, which claims 70% of wrongful convictions outcome from eyewitness lineups, a determine he used to argue in favor of Clearview’s comparatively increased accuracy charges.

“Clearview AI is able to help create a world of bias-free policing,” Ton-That claimed. “As a person of mixed race this is highly important to me.”

While these figures on their very own appear informative, they fail to account for the sheer scope and scale of Clearview’s pervasive expertise. They additionally fail to handle actually any of the broader privateness or civil liberties concerns which have most troubled advocates, significantly because it pertains to Clearview AI.

“We are proud of our record of achievement in helping over 3,100 law enforcement agencies in the United States solve heinous crimes, such as crimes against children and seniors, financial fraud and human trafficking,” Hoan Ton-That added.

In their letters, the lawmakers partially addressed these factors, arguing the potential threats posed by facial recognition lengthen past accuracy claims.

“Communities of color are systematically subjected to over-policing, and the proliferation of biometric surveillance tools is, therefore, likely to disproportionately infringe upon the privacy of individuals in Black, Brown, and immigrant communities,” the lawmakers wrote. “With respect to law enforcement use of biometric technologies specifically, reports suggest that use of the technology has been promoted among law enforcement professionals and reviews of deployment of facial recognition technology show that law enforcement entities are more likely to use it on Black and Brown individuals than they are on white individuals.”

This isn’t the primary time these lawmakers have taken on facial recognition. Back in 2020, the identical Democrats authored the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, which sought to finish federal use of real-time facial recognition expertise. That invoice would have additionally restricted the state’s entry to federal grants in the event that they selected to proceed utilizing facial recognition. At the time, the laws gained the endorsement of a litany of civil liberty and privateness teams, together with the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Color of Change, MediaJustice, Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Georgetown University Law Center’s Center on Privacy & Technology, amongst others.

Around two dozen cities and states throughout the U.S, together with San Francisco, Boston, and Minneapolis, have stepped up their efforts to curtail public facial recognition use lately, although a federal information privateness legislation has remained elusive.

You can learn the letters in full right here: