YouTube tells controversial facial recognition company to stop collecting its user data

YouTube on Wednesday sent a cease-and-desist letter to Clearview AI demanding that the controversial company stop collecting faces from its videos and delete any data it has collected already.

The letter, which serves as a warning of impending civil action, comes after Clearview CEO and founder Hoan Ton-That defended his company’s practice of scraping photos from the internet in an interview with CBS.

“YouTube’s Terms of Service explicitly forbid collecting data that can be used to identify a person,” YouTube spokesman Alex Joseph said in a statement to The Hill.

“Clearview has publicly admitted to doing exactly that, and in response we sent them a cease and desist letter,” Joseph added.

Clearview entered the public consciousness last month following a report in The New York Times that detailed the company’s work developing a database of 3 billion photos and its ties to more than 600 law enforcement agencies.

The facial recognition company built its software by scraping major social media platforms and allowing users to upload photos of strangers.

In the interview with CBS that aired Wednesday, Ton-That defended scraping by arguing that Clearview has a First Amendment right to access “public” data.

He also confirmed that Clearview received the cease-and-desist letter.

“We’ve received a letter, and our legal counsel has reached out to them and are handling it accordingly,” Ton-That said.

“But there is also a First Amendment right to public information. So the way we have built our system is to only take publicly available information and index it that way,” he added.

Twitter sent a cease-and-desist letter to Clearview last month with similar demands.