📚 Google, YouTube and Venmo Send Cease-and-Desist Letters To Facial Recognition App That Helps Law Enforcement

Google, YouTube and Venmo have sent cease-and-desist letters to Clearview AI, a facial recognition app that scrapes images from websites and social media platforms, CBS News has learned. The tech companies join Twitter, which sent a similar letter in January, in trying to block the app from taking pictures from their platforms. From the report: Clearview AI can identify a person by comparing their picture to its database of three billion images from the internet, and the results are 99.6% accurate, CEO Hoan Ton-That told CBS News correspondent Errol Barnett. The app is only available to law enforcement to be used to identify criminals, Ton-That said. "You have to remember that this is only used for investigations after the fact. This is not a 24/7 surveillance system," he said. But YouTube, which is owned by Google, as well as Venmo and Twitter say the company is violating its policies. [...] In addition to demanding that Clearview AI stop scraping content from Twitter, the social media platform demanded that the app delete all data already collected from Twitter, according to an excerpt of the cease-and-desist letter given to CBS News.

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