Oosto Applaud’s Australian Information Commissioner’s Clearview Ruling

Oosto is celebrating the Australian Information Commissioner’s recent ruling against Clearview AI, framing it as a validation of the company’s ethical guidelines concerning facial recognition technology.

The recent ruling concerned Clearview’s controversial use of facial recognition technology. The company is now notorious for scanning the internet, including social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, to build a face database for its facial recognition platform, which has been sold to law enforcement agencies, retailers, and other clients.

Clearview has been accused of privacy violations and unethical behavior by a number of parties, and revelations of its work have prompted multiple investigations from regulators and other government agencies around the world. One of those was the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, which determined that the company’s practices were in violation of the Australian Privacy Act of 1988, largely for collecting citizens’ biometric data without their consent and using “unfair means” to do so.

For Oosto – itself a facial recognition specialist – it’s a textbook case of what not to do. Almost literally: the company recently published an eBook in which it made the case for implementing ethical guidelines to govern the development and use of this biometric technology. Among the guidelines is the recommendation that facial recognition vendors only sell the technology itself to clients, and not pre-built databases.

“Scraping images of people from the web without their consent is, in our view, a serious violation of the right to privacy,” said Oosto CEO Avi Golan. “As a vendor of AI based facial recognition products for private companies and government agencies it is important for me to emphasize – facial recognition apps should be provided with an empty database.”

In recent weeks Golan has been overseeing a major strategic pivot on the part of his company, which has rebranded from its previous moniker, AnyVision, and sought to expand its focus beyond biometric security and into new application areas for its computer vision technology. To that end, the company recently announced a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Biometric Research Center, whose founder and director, Marios Savvides, is now Oosto’s Chief AI Scientist.

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November 11, 2021 – by Alex Perala