Illustration by James Bareham / The Verge
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Justice, the FBI, Macy’s, and Best Buy are among the thousands of government agencies and private companies using the software of facial recognition company Clearview AI, according to a leaked client list obtained exclusively by BuzzFeed News.
The controversial company’s database, which includes more than 3 billion images scraped from social media and other sites, is aimed at helping law enforcement catch persons of interest, as first reported by The New York Times last month. According to the Times investigation, Clearview AI’s tools could identify people from the scraped images, revealing their names, where they lived, and other personal information.
But numerous companies have…