Clearview AI — Case Brief

AI-generated. This brief was written by AI as a plain-language factual summary for class use. Verify against primary sources before relying on it.

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Clearview AI built a facial-recognition search engine. Starting around 2017 it scraped billions of photographs from the open web — Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Venmo, news sites, personal pages — copying any face it could find, without asking anyone. Its database now holds tens of billions of images.

The product is simple: upload a photo of a face and Clearview returns other photos of that same person from across the internet, each linked to where it came from — often revealing the person’s name, employer, social accounts, and who they associate with. From a single snapshot of a stranger on the street, a user can often identify them.

Clearview sold access mainly to police — thousands of agencies used it — and early on to some private companies and individuals. Every image it collected was already “public”: posted by the person, a friend, or an employer, on sites anyone could visit.

The major platforms (Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn) sent cease-and-desist letters; Clearview argued that public photos are fair to use. It has since been sued under biometric-privacy laws, barred from selling to most private companies in the U.S., and declared illegal or fined in the UK, France, Italy, Australia, and Canada. Notably, larger companies had built the same capability years earlier and chose not to release it. Clearview did.