Controversial facial recognition company claims it has a First Amendment right to your public photos

Hoan Ton-That, CEO of creepy facial recognition company Clearview AI, made the bold claim on Tuesday that his company has the right to publicly posted photos on Twitter and wielded the First Amendment as his reason. 

Clearview AI faced heat after it was discovered they had mined billions of publicly accessible images from Facebook and Ton-That’s comments prove the company isn’t backing down.

In an interview with CBS This Morning, Ton-That was asked about Twitter’s cease-and-desist order  requesting that his company stop scraping it’s data and delete everything Clearview AI has collected from the platform. In response, the facial recognition CEO claimed his company has a first amendment right to the data.

“We’ve received a letter, and our legal counsel has reached out to them and are handling it accordingly,” he said. “But there is also a First Amendment right to public information. So the way we have built our system is to only take publicly available information and index it that way.”

Twitter isn’t the only company that wants Clearview AI to stop scraping its data. CBS News on Wednesday that Google and YouTube have also sent cease-and-desist letters to the company. Facebook previously told the that it was investigating whether the company is violating its terms.

Ton-That’s response to Twitter’s request makes clear that the company will fight these requests using the First Amendment as a defense.

Law experts, like technology attorney Tiffany C. Li, have pointed out that Clearview AI’s first amendment argument has been used before.

In a case last year between LinkedIn and data analytics company HiQ, the court disagreed with the First Amendment defense that HhiQ made in order to scrape data from LinkedIn. However, HiQ won its case as the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that public data scraping was not against the law.

As Facebook’s former chief information security officer Alex Stamos , it’s also possible there’s a case that Clearview AI violated the copyrights of the millions of people in the photos it collected. Stamos also highlighted that the facial recognition company could be in violation of state laws as well, like the .

Clearview AI received national attention and scrutiny following a recent story on the company. The report uncovered that the company has already collected 3 billion images and its facial recognition technology has already been licensed to hundreds of law enforcement agencies. 

Following criticism of the facial recognition company from civil liberties organizations like the ACLU, New Jersey’s attorney general police use of Clearview AI’s technology in the state. However, there is currently no federal ban or regulation on such tech.