This action comes after a recent agreement with the Federal Trade Commission.
OkCupid / Wikimedia CommonsWhen digital services breach their stated privacy rules to profit from your images, rest assured: they may eventually face a financial penalty, even if it takes over a decade to materialize. (Who claims that justice is extinct?) In a recent report by Reuters, AI firm Clarifai announced that it has erased approximately 3 million user profile pictures originally harvested from the dating platform OkCupid back in 2014. This move aligns with a resolution finalized last month between the FTC and Match Group, the parent company of OkCupid.
According to reports, Clarifai, based in Delaware, formally confirmed the destruction of this data to the FTC on April 7. The firm also verified to U.S. Representative Lori Trahan (D-MA) that it had dismantled any AI models trained using the compromised information. Clarifai informed the representative’s office that the data was never distributed to outside entities.
The FTC launched its probe in 2019, following a The New York Times exposed that Clarifai had constructed a training dataset utilizing photos from OkCupid dating profiles. This practice directly contravened OkCupid’s privacy guidelines. Court papers examined by Reuters show that Clarifai requested the data from OkCupid leadership in 2014, and they apparently complied.
Clarifai employs this unsettling facial profiling demonstration to market its offerings.
(Clarifai)
“We are gathering data at the moment and just realized that OkCupid must have a HUGE amount of awesome data for this,” Clarifai founder Matthew Zeiler wrote in an email to OkCupid co-founder Maxwell Krohn. The AI startup utilized the dating site’s images to develop a facial recognition tool capable of determining a person’s age, gender, and race. (Another questionable and ethically dubious concept from Clarifai, involving unauthorized access to unsecured city surveillance cameras, was reportedly discontinued.)
Zeiler previously advised The New York Times in 2019 that the public should simply accept the situation. “There has to be some level of trust with tech companies like Clarifai to put powerful technology to good use, and get comfortable with that,” the AI founder stated. Some of OkCupid’s founders were reportedly investors in Clarifai.
Under the terms of the agreement, the FTC “permanently prohibited” OkCupid from misrepresenting its data collection and privacy controls. TechCrunch observes how peculiar it is to use that as a penalty, given that FTC rules already bar that behavior.
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