Secretive face-matching startup has customer list stolen

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)

Clearview, a secretive facial-recognition startup that claims to scrape the Internet for images to use, has itself now had data unexpectedly scraped, in a manner of speaking. Someone apparently popped into the company's system and stole its entire client list, which Clearview to date has refused to share.

Clearview notified its customers about the leak today, according to The Daily Beast, which obtained a copy of the notification. The memo says an intruder accessed the list of customers, as well as the number of user accounts those customers set up and the number of searches those accounts have conducted.

"Unfortunately, data breaches are part of life in the 21st century," Tor Ekeland, an attorney for Clearview, told The Daily Beast. "Our servers were never accessed. We patched the flaw and continue to work to strengthen our security."

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