Clearview AI could be fined £17M from UK privacy watchdog

Clearview AI is back in hot water, this time from the UK's Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

The controversial facial recognition giant has caught the attention of global privacy regulators and campaigners for its practice of scraping personal photos from the web for its system without explicit consent.

Clearview AI is expected to have scraped over 10 billion photos.

“Common law has never recognised a right to privacy for your face,” Clearview AI...

30 November 2021 | Companies

SenseTime prepares to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange

Chinese AI giant SenseTime has received regulatory approval to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKSE).

SenseTime is the world’s most-funded AI firm and has attracted large investments in part due to providing technology for the Chinese government’s vast surveillance network.

The company’s Viper system aims to process and analyse over 100,000 simultaneous real-time streams from traffic cameras, ATMs, and more to automatically tag and keep track of...

24 November 2021 | Artificial Intelligence

UK-Aus probe finds Clearview AI fails to comply with privacy regulations

A joint UK-Australia probe has found that Clearview AI fails to comply with privacy regulations.

The facial recognition provider has been the focus of many investigations for its controversial practice of scraping the online data of people without their consent.

The joint investigation, conducted by the ​​UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), found that Clearview AI has scraped the biometric...

4 November 2021 | Ethics & Society

MEPs back AI mass surveillance ban for the EU

MEPs from the European Parliament have adopted a resolution in favour of banning AI-powered mass surveillance and facial recognition in public spaces.

With a 71 vote majority, MEPs sided with Petar Vitanov’s report that argued AI must not be allowed to encroach on fundamental rights.

An S&D party member, Vitanov pointed out that AI has not yet proven to be a wholly reliable tool on its own.

He cited examples of individuals being denied social benefits...

7 October 2021 | Ethics & Society

Paravision boosts its computer vision and facial recognition capabilities

US-based Paravision has announced updates to boost its computer vision and facial recognition capabilities across mobile, on-premise, edge, and cloud deployments.

“From cloud to edge, Paravision’s goal is to help our partners develop and deploy transformative solutions around face recognition and computer vision,” said Joey Pritikin, Chief Product Officer at Paravision.

“With these sweeping updates to our product family, and with what has become possible in terms...

29 September 2021 | Applications

How AI video surveillance impacts the way businesses approach security

Security cameras are a great way to keep an eye on commercial spaces without being on-site, especially after-hours. While security is a 24/7 business, most organizations can’t afford to monitor their systems at all hours of the day and night. Hiring a third-party provider to monitor is expensive, and even with eyes on screens, human error still results in missed reports, slow response, and increased insurance and liability costs. 

24/7 video monitoring was previously...

29 September 2021 | Applications

NIST: VisionLabs, IDEMIA, and CloudWalk lead in facial recognition accuracy

A report from the US government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reveals the accuracy of various facial recognition algorithms.

The latest edition of the report currently has VisionLabs, IDEMIA, and CloudWalk in the lead:

Higher numbers are better as they indicate a lower prevalence of false positives.

The “N” values represent the number of individuals enrolled in each simulation of aircraft boarding. The N = 42,000 simulation,...

25 August 2021 | Face Recognition

Twitter turns to HackerOne community to help fix its AI biases

Twitter is recruiting the help of the HackerOne community to try and fix troubling biases with its AI models.

The image-cropping algorithm used by Twitter was intended to keep the most interesting parts of an image in the preview crop in people’s timelines. That’s all good, until users found last year that it favoured lighter skin colours over dark and the breasts and legs of women over their faces.

When researchers fed a picture of a black man and a white woman into...

2 August 2021 | Applications

You can now buy AI technologies from TikTok

From the company’s owner, not your favourite TikTok influencer.

Behind every successful TikTok video is a bunch of clever algorithms helping to make it a viral sensation. The company’s owner, ByteDance, launched a new division last month called BytePlus which sells TikTok’s AI technologies.

Up for grabs is the recommendation algorithm behind the ForYou feed, computer vision tech, automatic speech-to-text and text-to-speech, data analysis tools, and...

5 July 2021 | Enterprise

Reintroduction of facial recognition legislation receives mixed responses

The reintroduction of the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act in the 117th Congress has received mixed responses.

An initial version of the legislation was introduced in 2020 but was reintroduced June 15 2021 by Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.)

“We do not have to forgo privacy and justice for safety,” said Senator Markey. “This legislation is about rooting out systemic racism and stopping invasive technologies from becoming irreversibly embedded...

17 June 2021 | Ethics & Society