Clearview AI Scraped Your Face and Sold It to Police

Our Take

Coldwire lays out a case that should terrify anyone who thinks 'I've done nothing wrong, I have nothing to hide': a man with zero ties to Louisiana spent six days in a cage because a facial recognition match from a company that scraped billions of photos without consent told police he was their guy. Clearview AI didn't ask permission to build its database, and the departments buying access to it aren't asking many questions either. That's the pattern with algorithmic policing — the tech gets sold as infallible right up until it wrecks an innocent person's life, and by then the damage is done.

This isn't a separate issue from what we track here. Flock Safety's ALPR network and Clearview's face database are built on the same premise: harvest as much biometric and location data as possible, sell law enforcement a subscription to search it, and let the false positives be someone else's problem. A plate misread sends cops to the wrong driveway; a face mismatch sends the wrong man to jail. Different sensor, same unaccountable pipeline, and almost always the same demographic groups eating the consequences of bad matches.

If you want to see how far this dragnet has spread into your own neighborhood, check our camera map and find out what's already watching you. And if you're ready to push back on city councils buying into this stuff without oversight, our take-action page has the tools to start that fight locally.