If online platforms violate privacy policies and sell your photos, they may be forced to pay a settlement fee that is not disclosed 12 years later. Who says justice is dead? Reuters reports that Clarifai, an AI company, has removed 3 million profile pictures taken from OkCupid dating site in 2014. Clarifai, based in Delaware, reportedly certified to the FTC the deletion of data on April 7th. The company confirmed to US Representative Lori Trahan, D-MA, that it had deleted any models trained on the data. Clarifai informed the representative’s office it had not shared the data. The FTC launched the investigation in 2019 after The New York Times reported Clarifai’s training database was built using OkCupid dating profiles. This behavior was a direct breach of OkCupid’s privacy policy. Clarifai requested the data from OkCupid executives in 2014, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters. Apparently, they obliged.
Clarifai uses this creepy facial profiling example to sell its services.
Clarifai”We’re collecting data now and just realized that OkCupid must have a HUGE amount of awesome data for this,” Clarifai founder Matthew Zeiler wrote in an email to OkCupid co-founder Maxwell Krohn. The AI startup used images from the dating site to create a facial recognition system that can identify an individual’s age and gender. Clarifai’s brilliant and ethical idea of tapping into unauthorised city surveillance cameras was shut down. Zeiller told The New York Times that people should get over it in 2019. “There must be a level of trust in tech companies like Clarifai, to use powerful technology for good purposes. Get comfortable with that,” declared the AI founder. As part of the settlement the FTC “permanently banned” OkCupid for misrepresenting its privacy and data collection controls. TechCrunch notes how strange it is to use that as a penalty, given that FTC rules already bar that behavior.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/ai-company-deletes-the-3-million-okcupid-photos-it-used-for-facial-recognition-training-195223996.html?src=rss
