More than 2,200 agencies and companies have tried Clearview, report finds
Found on Ars Technica on Saturday, 29 February 2020
Secretive startup Clearview AI distributes an apparently very powerful facial recognition tool that matches anyone against an enormous database of photos—it claims more than 3 billion—scraped from basically every major US platform on the Internet.
Apparently "security professionals" includes retailers such as Best Buy, Kohl's, Walmart, and Macy's, with Macy's on the actual paying customers list.
Nor is Clearview's spread limited to the US market: users affiliated with Interpol and a sovereign wealth fund in the United Arab Emirates both used the app, and accounts were found in several other nations, including Saudi Arabia and Australia.
It would be interesting to see if scraping billions of photos of people to build a searchable database is fully legal. Some countries are very picky about these things.