Clearview claims to have a facial recognition database with 20 billion photographs taken from public sources such as Facebook and Instagram. It formerly sold its software to a wide range of private users and corporations but recently decided to limit its sales in the United States to government agencies and police departments in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Clearview AI’s services have previously been employed by law enforcement customers such as the Metropolitan Police, Ministry of Defence, and National Crime Agency in the United Kingdom. According to the ICO, the company “no longer offers its services to UK organizations,” although the data scraped from UK citizens can still be utilized by customers in other nations.
