The government is moving to award a lucrative patent for a “search engine for faces,” a technology that has members of Congress and privacy advocates up in arms.
Clearview AI has gotten the green light on a federal patent for its facial recognition technology — an award that the company says is the first to cover a so-called “search engine for faces” that crawls the internet to find matches.
Clearview’s software — which scrapes public images from social media to help law enforcement match images in government databases or surveillance footage — has long faced fire from privacy advocates who say it uses people’s faces without their knowledge or consent.
Civil rights groups also argue that facial recognition technology is generally error-prone, misidentifying women and minorities at higher rates than it does white men and sometimes leading to false arrests.
