Clearview AI - the facial recognition company whose massive database has been used recently to identify Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine, as well as rioters who stormed the US Capitol building in 2021 - will no longer sell its technology to private companies in the US as part of an historic data privacy settlement.
The company first came under the spotlight in 2020 when its database containing billions of faces was breached. This prompted privacy advocates to condemn Clearview AI’s business model, based on scraping billions of publicly available images from social media to train its facial-recognition software, which was later sold to law enforcement agencies to help identify people from closed-circuit television footage.
The settlement - which must still be approved by a county judge in Chicago - marks the most significant court action yet against Clearview AI. It also ends a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups in...