Surveillance Tech Firm Clearview AI Raises $30 Mn Despite Shady Past
Clearview AI is currently facing investigations by British and Australian governments. The surveillance firm has received a substantial amount in investment despite mounting class action lawsuits. Earlier this month, the New York-based startup raised $30 million in Series B. Clearview has scraped the web to cull billions of personal images of people worldwide without their permission. More than 1,800 law enforcement agencies have used Clearview’s  facial recognition technology, according to a leaked list accessed by Buzzfeed. Past investors Peter Thiel, Kirenaga Partners, a NY based venture capital firm, and Hal Lambert, Founder of investment company Point Bridge Capital, haD EARLIER invested in Clearview in the past. The company has not disclosed the identity of investors in the latest round. Lambert’ company has set up an exchange-traded fund called MAGA ETF “to let people invest in 150 companies from the S&P 500 Index whose employees and political action committees (PACs) are highly supportive of Republican candidates.” According to Point Bridge’s website, Lambert served on the Inaugural Committee for President Donald Trump and was the finance chair for the Texas GOP. Lambert has also taken to his social media profiles to criticise the Black Lives Matter protests and spread misinformation about the racial justice movement. Clearview AI in the headlines The British and Australian authorities have launched a probe into the company’s data scraping techniques. Canada has banned Clearview AI’s controversial tech. The American Civil Liberties Union in Illinois accused the app of violating the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act, after which the company stopped selling its product to private companies in the US. Clearview has also faced legal action in Vermont, New York and California. Nonprofit news site Muckrock obtained emails between the New York Police Department and Clearview through freedom of information requests and released the data in April this year. The emails track a two year relationship between NYPD and clearview where the company offered trial rounds to the police department, testing the facial recognition tools in live investigations. While NYPD has downplayed its relationship with Clearview AI, it is evident that Clearview has indeed cut a deal. The emails showed cops used the app to conduct more than 5,000 searches. Meanwhile, state policies limit NYPD from creating an unsupervised repository of photos for facial recognition. Still, the emails show Hoan Ton-That, Clearview AI’s CEO, was introduced to NYPD deputy inspector Chris Flanagan in 2018. Following this, Clearview entered into a vendor contract with NYPD on a ‘trial basis’ in 2018. But accounts for NYPD were created till February 2020 even though the trial period should have ended in 2019. NYPD also offered to aid Clearview in selling its technology to the Homeland Security department. Controversy galore The police departments used Amazon’s Rekognition till 2020. In the wake of protests from civil liberty advocates and activists, Amazon had put a moratorium on facial recognition software. Palantir Technologies has government agencies as clients, including the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The company itself began with funding from the CIA, and despite the controversies surrounding it, Palantir went public in 2020. The company has raised a total of $2.6 billion in funding over 34 rounds. While controversy is ‘bad’ publicity for tech giants like Amazon, the attention seems to be working in favour of companies like Clearview AI. Companies like Palantir cashed in on the controversies to cut deals with government agencies.
Clearview has also faced legal action in Vermont, New York and California.
Clearview has also faced legal action in Vermont, New York and California.
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["Go", "API", "funding", "AWS", "AI", "venture capital", "BERT", "GAN", "R", "startup"]
["AI", "AWS", "R", "Go", "API", "BERT", "GAN", "startup", "venture capital", "funding"]
Avi Gopani is a technology journalist that seeks to analyse industry trends and developments from an interdisciplinary perspective at Analytics India Magazine. Her articles chronicle cultural, political and social stories that are curated with a focus on the evolving technologies of artificial intelligence and data analytics.