Things Are Looking Up: Clearview Cuts Sales Staff, Dumps Chief Revenue Officer
from the keep-withering,-clowns dept
Clearview has never had a great reputation. Its first appearance in the public eye — via a Kashmir Hill report for the New York Times — was inauspicious, to say the least. The company’s database was composed of data and photos scraped from thousands of websites. This image database — which has now passed 10 billion images — is packaged with Clearview’s facial recognition AI and sold to whoever wants to buy it: law enforcement agencies, app developers, human rights violators, retailers, etc.
After being sued in Illinois for violating the state’s privacy laws (and facing fines and fees around the world for similar violations), Clearview reached a settlement agreement in which it would suspend sales of its product to private entities in the United States. This does not, however, prevent it from selling to private companies contracted by government agencies, so Clearview still has some revenue options in the US.
But when your company arrives on the scene with its reputation already in tatters, there’s only so much you can do. The company could have made moves to rehabilitate its image, perhaps by ditching its scraped image database and focusing more on things like 1:1 facial recognition that does not rely on third party content to make the AI useful. Clearview has a solid AI that could be deployed responsibly, but has chosen to become the top pariah in a sketchy field full of questionable tech purveyors.
Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That has frequently displayed a dismissive attitude toward the steady stream of criticism his company has faced. That dismissive attitude has likely contributed to actual dismissals as the company struggles to survive following several self-inflicted reputational wounds.
Clearview AI cut much of its sales staff this week and has parted ways with two of three executives hired about a year ago, according to people familiar with the matter and posts online, as the high-profile facial recognition startup grapples with litigation and difficult economic conditions.
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The cuts included staff who worked with local law enforcement, LinkedIn profiles showed.
The CEO is downplaying these developments, which appear to show a company unsure of what market it should be pursuing. Ton-That claims this is just normal business stuff being done to “better position” Clearview for “financial security.” But cutting sales staff and the head of revenue generation suggests, at best, a change in product focus is underway, shifting Clearview away from the law enforcement market it clearly desired to something a bit less problematic, like 1:1 security products for government agencies and contractors that have no access to the company’s 10-billion scraped image database that has generated so much negative press.
If so, that’s great. If it’s some deck chair reshuffling prior to insolvency, so be it. But if it’s Ton-That opening up positions to fill with people who will more aggressively pursue sales of its ethically odious, scraped-from-the-web product to whoever it can, we can only hope it will never find enough paying customers to keep the lights on.
Filed Under: facial recognition, privacy, surveillance
Companies: clearview
Comments on “Things Are Looking Up: Clearview Cuts Sales Staff, Dumps Chief Revenue Officer”
We can also only hope. . .
. . . that this is the beginning of the end for Clearview and that the door does hit CEO Hoan Ton-That in the a$$ on the way out. Hard!
Clearview was useful for one thing...
It gave governments a Clearview of what technology not to employ! 😄
Things are looking up?
Because the only thing better than a sketchy company with harmful technology is the same company filing for bankruptcy and have their harmful technology and assets garnered partly with lukewarm promises sold to unknown bidders not bound by those promises?
Nothing bad ever goes waste.
Re:
That’s my worry: at least right now, we know where ClearView is and what they’ve got, and can instruct governments and private entities alike to avoid it.
Once their “assets” are sold off in bankruptcy, they’ll end up “somewhere” and only some of them will ever become public — because people who work with this stuff learned from ClearView that you don’t let it get into public view if you want to keep your power and money.
Likely, next time around, the huge database of other people’s photos will end up being hid behind “complicated AI algorithm purchased from an expert in the field — we have no idea how it actually works”.