FACES ARE PUBLIC:

Police typically have image search engines at their disposal that pull drivers' license pictures or other photos among police records.  

Clearview AI, in contrast, has gathered billions of images from social media sites and other websites, which internet firms say were obtained by breaking their rules.  

Clearview AI's Ton-That says that the company only pulls publicly available information.   

In one case, federal agents were able to identify a man suspected of sexual abuse of a girl using a single image from the "dark web," an area of the internet only accessible by special software and matching it through Clearview AI.   

"He was in the background of someone else's photo at the gym, in the mirror," said Ton-That. "They were able to identify where the gym was, identify the person, he ended up doing 35 years in jail and they saved a seven-year-old."   

The software was also instrumental in helping federal as well as state and local law enforcement identify suspects that stormed the U.S. Capitol in January, according to Ton-That.  

In one way, Clearview AI, which has created its database from people's social media accounts and other public parts of the internet, was well suited to help with this massive investigation of people whose mugshots wouldn't necessarily be in police databases, he said.   

Police were able to use Clearview AI, which runs about a second per search, he said, and find matching photos online of some suspects.   

"So they were able to quickly identify them, and reduce a lot of false-positives, and also speed up the investigative process," he said. 

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