A startup company took billions of photos from Facebook and other websites to create a facial-recognition database, and hundreds of law-enforcement agencies are using it

Photo caption: Facebook logos are seen on a mobile phone in this picture illustration taken December 2, 2019. Reuters/Johanna Geron/Illustration

Clearwater AI, a facial-recognition startup that scraped social media for images, has been adopted by at least 600 law-enforcement agencies, according to a New York Times report. […]

When a user uploads a photo to the application, which has been used by more than 600 law-enforcement agencies, Clearview AI scans for matches across its catalogue of billions of photos it scraped from social media websites, typically in violation of those sites’ terms of service, according to The Times. It then shows the results to whomever made the search. {…] On Wednesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, expressed fears about facial-recognition technology during a meeting of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. […]

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