The state of Vermont has sued the company behind a facial recognition tool that has built a vast database from photos of private individuals it has gathered across the internet and social media platforms without consent.
Attorney General TJ Donovan announced Tuesday his office has filed a lawsuit in Vermont Superior Court in Chittenden County against Clearview AI, alleging the secretive business has violated the state’s consumer protection law by illegally collecting images of Vermont residents, including children, and selling this information to private businesses, individuals and law enforcement.
“I am disturbed by this practice, particularly the practice of collecting and selling children’s facial recognition data,” Donovan said in a statement. “This practice is unscrupulous, unethical, and contrary to public policy. I will continue to fight for the privacy of Vermonters, particularly our most vulnerable.”
Little was known about Clearview and its practices before Jan. 18, when the New York Times published an expose of the company’s facial recognition mobile application, which allows the user to take a picture of a person with their smartphone, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared.
To allow this type of immediate identification of an individual, Clearview has harvested pictures from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, YouTube and millions of other websites to create a vast database for facial recognition without the consent of the companies or individuals.
In January, around the time when the New York Times published its report on Clearview, the company registered as a data broker in Vermont — an entity that collects information about individuals from public and private sources for profit.
Data brokers that sell Vermonters’ data must register annually with the state’s data broker registry and provide certain information about business practices. In the registry, Clearview reported that it knowingly “possesses the brokered personal information of minors,” according to the attorney general’s lawsuit.
This raised a series of red flags for Vermont’s top law enforcement official.
On Feb. 11 VTDigger reached out to the Attorney General’s Office to ask if it was aware of Vermont law enforcement agencies using Clearview and if Donovan would join New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Singh Grewal in calling for police to stop using the technology.
Donovan’s office responded that it had contacted New Jersey to understand its “concerns and their decision” and would update the press when it had more information.
In the lawsuit filed Tuesday, Donovan argues that Clearview has violated multiple Vermont laws including the fraudulent acquisition data statute.
The state’s lawsuit also makes the case that when an individual uploads a photograph to Facebook for “public” viewing, they consent to others looking at the photograph but are not consenting to the “mass collection of those photographs by an automated process that will then put those photographs into a facial recognition database.”
In addition to the lawsuit, Donovan filed an immediate injunction Tuesday asking the court to order Clearview to immediately stop collecting or storing Vermonters’ photos and facial recognition data and to remove the data, “especially those of Vermont children.”
Charity Clark, a spokesperson for Donovan, said the Office of the Attorney General is “not aware of any private company or anyone currently using Clearview AI in Vermont.”
However, Clearview’s identification tool and database has become integral for law enforcement agencies and a slew of private entities elsewhere.
The list of clients that use Clearview’s technology include U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Walmart, Best Buy, Kohl’s, Macy’s, the National Basketball Association and others, according to a Feb. 27 report by Buzzfeed News.
