or the past three months, a small encrypted group chat of Latin American officials who investigate online child-exploitation cases has been lighting up with reports of raids, arrests, and rescued minorsThe successes are the result of a recent trial of a facial-recognition tool given to a group of Latin American law-enforcement officials, investigators, and prosecutors by the American company Clearview AI.
and government officials interviewed by TIME."Clearview was a vital resource because of its ability to search and compare faces in its vast database of images pulled from social networks," says Captain Diego Rafael Calispa of the Directorate of Children, Adolescence and Family of the Ecuadorian Police., or Digital Guardians for Children, provides a rare glimpse into how Clearview AI has quietly expanded into Latin America and the Caribbean in recent years.
in a class-action lawsuit that could potentially give any American whose photos are in Clearview’s database a stake in the company.imposed steep financial penalties on the company for breaching privacy laws,Clearview’s reception in Latin America and the Caribbean has been far more enthusiastic, and the company sees the region as a promising new market with a looser approach to personal data and privacy regulations.
Clearview says it carefully vets the countries it decides to operate in on a case-by-case basis, including their human-rights record and any legal restrictions, and also consults with DHS and the State Department.
to find a match, which often links back to social profiles that expose a person's identity, location, and family members. This database now contains more than 50 billion images, according to the company, and has been searched more than 2 million times. Outside of the U.S., Clearview has been used most extensively in Ukraine, where it made initial inroads in a similar fashion. At first, the company provided its tools for free to a wartime government under siege from Russia’s invasion and eager to find ways to fight back. Within months, 1,500 officials across 18 Ukrainian government agencies were using it to identify Russian soldiers, suspected Ukrainian collaborators, and abducted children who were transported to Russia.