Clearview AI’s client list leaks.
Clearview AI, a controversial company that scrapes billions of images from the internet and uses facial recognition to match people to their photos, disclosed that an intruder had gained access to its entire list of clients, the Daily Beast reports. The data that were accessed included the number of user accounts each customer had, as well as how many searches each of them had carried out. The company said the intruder didn’t access clients’ search histories, which Mashable points out could have had much more serious implications.
On Thursday, BuzzFeed published details gleaned from leaked internal company documents which showed that Clearview’s clients include about 2,900 organizations across twenty-seven countries. While the company maintains that it only works with law enforcement, a number of private companies appeared in its list of customers, including Macy’s, Kohl’s, Walmart, and the NBA. Some of these companies and law enforcement agencies were apparently unaware that their employees had used the app, and most of them only used free trials. Home Depot, for example, appears in Clearview’s logs as having conducted nearly one-hundred…
