Face Scanner Clearview AI Aims To Branch Out Beyond Police

A controversial facial recognition company that's built a massive photographic dossier of the world's people for use by police, national governments and -- most recently -- the Ukrainian military is now planning to offer its technology to banks and other private businesses. The Washington Post reports: Clearview AI co-founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That disclosed the plans Friday to The Associated Press in order to clarify a recent federal court filing that suggested the company was up for sale. 'We don't have any plans to sell the company,' he said. Instead, he said the New York startup is looking to launch a new business venture to compete with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft in verifying people's identity using facial recognition.

The new 'consent-based' product would use Clearview's algorithms to verify a person's face, but would not involve its ever-growing trove of some 20 billion images, which Ton-That said is reserved for law enforcement use. Such ID checks that can be used to validate bank transactions or for other commercial purposes are the 'least controversial use case' of facial recognition, he said. That's in contrast to the business practice for which Clearview is best known: collecting a huge trove of images posted on Facebook, YouTube and just about anywhere else on the publicly-accessible internet.

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