EU privacy groups set sights on facial recognition firm

PARIS - Privacy organisations on Thursday complained to regulators in five European countries over the practices of Clearview AI, a company that has built a powerful facial recognition database using images "scraped" from the web. Clearview's use of images -- including those from people's social media accounts -- to offer biometrics services to private companies and law enforcement "goes far beyond what we could ever expect as online users", Ioannis Kouvakas, legal officer at Privacy International, said in a statement. While Clearview touts its technology's ability to help law enforcement, its critics say facial recognition is open to abuse and could ultimately eliminate anonymity in public spaces -- pointing to cases like China's massive public surveillance system. Facial recognition has also been attacked for failing to distinguish non-white people's faces and women as well as it ca...