Privacy in the Age of Facial Recognition

As a security and privacy professional, it is hard not to have heard of the controversial facial recognition app Clearview AI. It made the news last year when the story about it broke in the New York Times. It was just a matter of time before someone combined Internet/social media crawling technologies and artificial intelligence to come up with an app that would allow for creating a facial recognition database of pictures/faces and available social media data about those individuals. It is not surprising that law enforcement seems to appreciate the ability to identify and track individuals online with such an app.

On June 10th, 2020 Thomas Daigle published an article on CBC.ca in which he requested the data and pictures that Clearview AI had stored of him. Daigle based his request on Clearview’s privacy policy which gives individuals the ability to make a request for copies. According to Clearview AI’s privacy policy, you have “The right to access – You have the right to request that Clearview AI provides you with copies of your personal data”.

After reading about Clearview AI and the articles that followed, my curiosity was piqued and I wanted to investigate further. I decided to make a request for my data/pictures stored by Clearview AI with the intent to:

See what, if any, data/pictures they have of me
Find out where they got the information from – according to Thomas Daigle’s article the results include links to where the pictures were obtained from by Clearview AI
And, confirm whether any of the websites that allowed my pictures/data to be obtained by Clearview AI could be deleted, locked down, or dealt with in any other manner so my pictures/data would no longer be accessible publicly

To begin the process, I had my wife take my headshot as you need to send a headshot of yourself to Clearview AI in order for them to search their database for your image. Once the photo was taken, I sent Clearview a short and simple email: