Facial Recognition Biz Clearview AI Suffers Data Breach

A controversial facial recognition company has just informed its customers of a data breach in which its entire client list was stolen. Clearview AI leapt to fame in January when a New York Times report claimed that the start-up had scraped up to three billion images from social media sites to add to its database. That makes it a useful resource for its law enforcement clients, which can query images they capture against the trove. The FBI’s own database is said to contain little more than 600 million images. Now those clients have been exposed after an unauthorized intruder managed to access the Clearview AI’s entire customer list, the number of user accounts those companies have set up, and the number of searches they’ve carried out. However, they apparently didn’t get hold of client search histories. Interestingly, the firm claimed that its own servers, systems and network weren’t compromised.