Facebook, YouTube order Clearview to stop scraping them for faces to match

Enlarge / A video surveillance camera hangs from the side of a building on May 14, 2019, in San Francisco, California. (credit: Justin Sullivan | Getty Images)

A secretive startup that promotes a massive international universal facial recognition database seeded from more than three billion images is facing pushback from tech firms as it tries to woo more law enforcement agencies.

The company, called Clearview AI, went from near-complete obscurity to national headlines following a report published by the New York Times in January. The Times described Clearview as a "groundbreaking" facial recognition service. A user imports a photo of a person, and then the app shows "public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared," the NYT explains.

Clearview claims to have agreements with 600 law enforcement agencies for use of its services, and the company says it has a set of three billion public photos to match new images against. Those photos come from a wide array of sources, and the sources are ticked off.

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