Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
YouTube has sent a cease and desist letter to Clearview AI demanding that the controversial facial recognition startup stop scraping YouTube videos to gather faces for its database and delete any images it’s already collected. The demand, first reported by CBS News, says that YouTube forbids anyone from collecting data from its platform that can be used to identify people and that Clearview has admitted to violating this policy.
“YouTube’s Terms of Service explicitly forbid collecting data that can be used to identify a person,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement sent to The Verge. “Clearview has publicly admitted to doing exactly that, and in response we sent them a cease and desist letter.”