Clearview scraped billions of photos from social media and the open web without consent to build a facial-recognition search engine of 60+ billion faces. Upload a face, get back links to where that person appears online. It has been used by the FBI, DHS, and thousands of police departments — and fined or banned across Europe, Canada, and Australia. In 2025 it replaced founder-CEO Hoan Ton-That with co-CEOs Hal Lambert and Richard Schwartz and pivoted to chasing federal contracts, winning a facial-recognition award from ICE's Homeland Security Investigations.
Kashmir Hill revealed that Clearview had quietly scraped billions of photos and sold facial-recognition search to police — a company almost no one had heard of, already used by hundreds of agencies.
An ACLU suit under Illinois' biometric-privacy law ended with Clearview permanently barred from selling its faceprint database to most private companies nationwide.
Regulators in France, Italy, Greece, the U.K., and Australia ruled Clearview's scraping unlawful and levied multi-million-euro fines and deletion orders.
A leaked client list showed Clearview had been tried or used by thousands of police departments, the FBI, ICE, and even retailers — often without public knowledge or oversight.