Clearview AI scraped billions of photos from social media to build a facial recognition app that can ID anyone - here's everything you need to know about the mysterious company

In the initial report on Clearview, a slew of major tech platforms were named as targets for their scraping efforts: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Venmo.

Clearview mined each of those platforms for user photos, and then added them to Clearview's database, which it sells. And that process — lifting user photos from social platforms, then selling those photos — breaches the terms of service of every platform from which the photos were taken.

"YouTube's Terms of Service explicitly forbid collecting data that can be used to identify a person," YouTube spokesperson Alex Joseph told Business Insider in an email in early February. "Clearview has publicly admitted to doing exactly that, and in response we sent them a cease and desist letter."

Similar sentiments were shared by all the major social platforms, from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn and Venmo.

As major tech companies openly pushed back against Clearview's method for building an image database, Clearview's chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, went on the defensive. He argued that his company's software isn't doing anything illegal, and doesn't need to delete any of the images it has stored, because it's protected under US law.

"There is a First Amendment right to public information," he told CBS This Morning in an interview published in early February. "The way that we have built our system is to only take publicly available information and index it that way."

As for his response to the cease-and-desist letters? "Our legal counsel has reached out to them, and are handling it accordingly."

Clearview AI's lawyer, Tor Ekeland, told Business Insider in an emailed statement, "Clearview is a photo search engine that only uses publicly available data on the Internet. It operates in much the same way as Google's search engine. We are in receipt of Google and YouTube's letter and will respond accordingly."

Due to a "flaw" in Clearview AI's security measures, the company's entire list of clients was leaked, the company confirmed in late February.

As if that weren't problematic enough, the list of clients included some particularly notable institutions that fall pretty far outside the realm of law enforcement: Macy's, Kohl's, Walmart, and the NBA, among others, Buzzfeed News first reported.

The full client list spells out just how many people have access to Clearview's tech — people in more than 2,200 law enforcement departments, government agencies, and companies across 27 countries.

This directly contradicts how Clearview describes itself: "Clearview is a new research tool used by law enforcement agencies to identify perpetrators and victims of crimes." On Clearview's website, applying for the software means clicking a "Request Access" button directly below a sign that reads, "Available now for Law Enforcement."

When John Catsimatidis was finishing dinner in October 2018 at Cipriani in downtown Manhattan, he spotted something amiss: His daughter was also eating dinner there, on a date with an unknown man.

"I wanted to make sure he wasn't a charlatan," Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of the Gristedes chain of supermarkets, told The New York Times.

He asked the waiter to snap a photo of the man without their knowing, then used his smartphone to instantly identify him using a secretive facial-recognition app. He then texted the man's biography to his daughter.

"My date was very surprised," his daughter, Andrea, said.

And indeed he should have been; John Catsimatidis was using Clearview AI's software — supposedly intended for law enforcement — as a way to freak out his daughter.

According to The Times, Catsimatidis was one of several prospective investors who were given access to the app; he said he had access through a friend who cofounded the company. Peter Thiel, David Scalzo, Hal Lambert, and the actor turned investor Ashton Kutcher were also listed in the report as either having access or being suspected of having access to the app.