Why Doesn’t the Public Trust Facial Recognition?

Does the track record of some firms who capture peoples’ facial images without their consent make it impossible for facial recognition to get a fair hearing in the court of public opinion – or are there deeper issues concerning the technology?

Facial recognition company Clearview AI is by no means a stranger to controversy, but May 2022 must go down as a bad month in the courts even by their standards.

At the beginning of the month the company agreed that it would not sell its facial recognition technology to most private firms in the US in a settlement that was reached at a federal court in Illinois.

The company had previously come under the spotlight in 2020 when its database containing billions of faces was breached. The faces were scraped from social media and, at the time, privacy advocates in the US condemned the company.