After that Clearview AI With billions of photos scraped from the public web — websites like Instagram, Venmo, and LinkedIn — to create a facial recognition tool for law enforcement, many concerns have been raised about the company and its norm-breaking tool. Beyond the privacy implications and legality of what Clearview AI is doing, there have been questions about whether the tool will work as advertised: Can the company actually find the face of a particular person from billions of databases?
The implementation of Clearview AI was in the hands of law enforcement for years before its accuracy was tested by an unbiased third party. Now, after two federal tests last month, the tool’s accuracy is no longer a primary concern.
In the results announced Monday, New York-based Clearview top 10 from nearly 100 face recognition vendors federal exam aimed to reveal which tools are best at finding the right face when looking at photos of millions of people. Clearview performed less well on another version of the test, which simulated using facial recognition to gain access to buildings, such as verifying that a person was an employee.
“We’re delighted,” said Hoan Ton-That, Clearview’s CEO. “It reflects our real use case.”
The company also performed well last month in a so-called one-on-one test of the ability to simulate the face verification people use to unlock their smartphones, by matching two different photos of the same person.
Mr. Ton-That said the positive results were “a chance for the sales team”.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology manages Face Recognition Vendor Tests for two decades. Since these tests began, the report notes“Face recognition has undergone an industrial revolution, with algorithms increasingly tolerant of poorly lit and other low-quality images and poorly exposed subjects,” he said.
Clearview had an impressive debut in the research or one-to-many call lists, but the top performers were SenseTime, a Chinese company, and Cubox from South Korea. Ministry of Commerce in 2019 blacklisted SenseTime and 27 other Chinese organizations for their products involved in China’s campaign against the Uighurs and other Muslim minorities. owned by Axios reported He said the designation was later changed to “Beijing SenseTime”, which limited the effects of blacklisting.
Accuracy aside, questions remain about the legality of Clearview’s tool. Authorities Canada and Australia He said Clearview was breaking the law by failing to obtain the consent of citizens whose photos were in its database, and that the company was fighting privacy lawsuits in Illinois and Vermont.
