https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2020/01/20/the-next-big-privacy-scare-is-a-face-recognition-tool-youve-never-heard-of/

The global debate on the use of facial recognition by governments and law enforcement just got a lot more intense. Over the weekend, the New York Times’ Kashmir Hill published an eye-opening piece detailing a relatively unknown firm offering facial recognition services to roughly 600 US law enforcement agencies, with an image library more than seven times larger than that of the FBI.

It’s a Peter Thiel-funded company called Clearview AI, and its service matches faces from images you upload with those in its database of some three billion photos. These pictures have been scraped from ‘millions’ of websites, including Facebook, YouTube, and Venmo. In addition to having a massive database, Clearview AI also boasts the ability to match faces even when you upload imperfect pictures, i.e. taken at odd angles or from a height, like from a surveillance camera.