Google and YouTube have sent a cease-and-desist letter to Clearview AI, a facial recognition app that scraps images from the websites and social media platforms, CBS News has learned. The tech companies join Twitter, which sent a similar letter in January, in trying to block the app from taking pictures from their platforms.
The app is only available to law enforcement to be used to identify criminals, according to Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That. But YouTube, which is owned by Google, and Twitter say the company is violating their policies.
“YouTube’s Terms of Service explicitly forbid collecting data that can be used to identify a person. Clearview has publicly admitted to doing exactly that, and in response we sent them a cease and desist letter,” YouTube Spokesperson Alex Joseph said in a statement to CBS News.
“And comparisons to Google Search are inaccurate. Most websites want to be included in Google Search, and we give webmasters control over what information from their site is included in our search results, including the option to opt-out entirely,” Joseph said. “Clearview secretly collected image data of individuals without their consent, and in violation of rules explicitly forbidding them from doing so.”
In addition to demanding that Clearview AI stop scraping content from Twitter, the social media platform demanded that the app delete all data already collected from Twitter, according to an excerpt of the cease-and-desist letter given to CBS News.
Ton-That told CBS News correspondent Errol Barnett that Clearview AI has a First Amendment right to access public data.
“The way we have built our system is to only take publicly available information and index it that way, so that’s all I can say on the matter,” he said.
Ton-That said the company’s legal counsel was dealing with the letter from Twitter.
For more of Barnett’s interview with Ton-That, watch “CBS This Morning” Wednesday at 7/8c.
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