https://gizmodo.com/clearview-ais-search-engine-for-faces-set-to-receive-pa-1848166740

Privacy experts worry the patent could normalize Clearview’s controversial data scraping practices in lieu of meaningful legal constraints.

Clearview AI, the notorious facial recognition company which has partnered with over 2,400 law enforcement agencies across the U.S, is about to receive a patent for what it describes as a first of its kind, “search engine for faces.”

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Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That claimed his company’s tool would represent the first of its kind to use “large-scale internet data.” That translates to, the first facial recognition service to scrape billions of photos from social media and other publicly available databases, almost always without users’ consent. That sweeping database of faces includes somewhere around 10 billion images, according to Ton-That.