Tim Cushing writes:
Clearview is currently being sued by the attorney general of Vermont for violating the privacy rights of the state’s residents. As the AG’s office pointed out in its lawsuit, users of social media services agree to many things when signing up, but the use of their photos and personal information as fodder for facial recognition software sold to government agencies and a variety of private companies isn’t one of them.
[T]he term “publicly available” does not have any meaning in the manner used by Clearview, as even though a photograph is being displayed on a certain social media website, it is being displayed subject to all of the rights and agreements associated with the website, the law, and reasonable expectations. One of those expectations was not that someone would amass an enormous facial-recognition-fueled surveillance database, as the idea that this would be, permitted in the United States was, until recently, unthinkable.
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