Facial recognition company Clearview AI has announced plans to extend its technology to businesses, meaning the company is moving away from its original plan to serve mainly police.
New clients include Vaale, a Colombian app-based lending startup, and a U.S. company that sells visitor management systems to schools.
Vaale explained that it is introducing Clearview to match selfies with ID photos uploaded by users. By partnering with Clearview, Vaale is saving about 20% in costs and increasing accuracy and speed by replacing Amazon’s Rekognition service.
“We can’t have duplicate accounts and we have to avoid fraud. Without facial recognition, we can’t make Vaale work,” Vaale Chief Executive Santiago Tobón said.
Clearview AI has been fined by the U.K. and Italian governments for breaching data protection laws by collecting online images without consent. The company also settled with the U.S. rights activists this month over similar allegations.
Clearview uses publicly available photos to train its facial recognition tool, which primarily helps police identify people based on images on social media, but that business is under threat because of regulatory investigations.
The sources for this piece include an article in Reuters.
