Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI isn't done upsetting the world populous. After already angering world governments, the artificial intelligence company is looking to expand its worldwide reach.
Reported by WP, Clearview's uncomfortable facial recognition database will expand even more over the next few years. In a recent investors call, the company allegedly told investors that it’s aiming to get every single human in its database.
Clearview AI will catalogue everyone
According to a financial presentation acquired by The Washington Post, Clearview is attempting to massively increase its datasets. In the presentation, the company told investors that its planning to make “almost everyone in the world will be identifiable”.
Within the next year, the cyber-tracking company will increase its already massive dataset to “100 billion facial photos”. This is considerably more photos that there are people on the planet, giving the service multiple photos of every living person.
Currently, Clearview AI already has access to around 10 billion photos from social media and other Internet sources. At the time of writing, the company is adding a massive 1.5 billion faces to its dataset every month.
However, if the facial recognition company wants to increase its dataset to 100 billion photos, it needs more money. Considerably more money. In fact, the company has told investors that it needs around “$50 million from investors” to grow.
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Its growth plans are even more creepy
Facial recognition may be Clearview’s bread and butter right now, but the company is also looking to expand. Alongside faces, the company aims to introduce new ways of identification to its already creepy services.
Clearview AI claims that its researching new ways to monitor citizens. These include monitoring an individual’s walk, scanning fingerprints from images and detecting a location from an image. All three are uncomfortable levels of privacy breaching.
Of course, all of this data would be scoured from social media without consent of individual users or even social media websites. In fact, Clearview has been told to stop scraping data by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. However, the service argued that if Google can do that for search, it can do the same to track people.
Clearview AI is being used by governments, mostly the United States. In its most high-profile case, the technology was used to identify participants in the Capitol Insurrection of 2020. However, it’s also facing heavy scrutiny from world powers as privacy concerns increase.
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