Clearview AI is apparently on the verge of securing a US patent for its contentious face recognition technology. According to Politico, the US Patent and Trademark Office has issued a 'notice of permission' to Clearview AI. The message indicates that the patent will be awarded after the administrative costs are paid.

Clearview AI provides one of the world's most advanced facial recognition systems. Clearview AI stated that police use of their facial recognition technology jumped by 26 percent in the aftermath of the US Capitol raid. The criticism around Clearview AI stems from the fact that, aside from any suspected far-right affiliations, its system employs over 10 billion photographs harvested from public web profiles without the users' explicit agreement. 'Common law has never recognised a right to privacy for your face,' Tor Ekeland, a Clearview AI lawyer, once claimed. It's worth mentioning that Ekeland rose to prominence as 'The Troll's Lawyer' after defending clients such as self-described neo-Nazi troll Andrew Auernheimer. 

Clearview AI was fined a maximum £17 million by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) last month and told to erase the personal data it possesses on British individuals and halt further processing.

According to leaked papers, Clearview AI's technology was tested by UK authorities such as the Metropolitan Police, the Ministry of Defense, the National Crime Agency, and a number of police constabularies such as Surrey, North Yorkshire, Suffolk, and Northamptonshire. However, the technology is no longer being utilised or tested in the United Kingdom.

'UK data protection legislation does not preclude the effective use of technology to combat crime,' said UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham. 'However, in order to maintain public trust and confidence in their products, technology providers must ensure people's legal protections are respected and complied with.' The UK's judgement was the outcome of a joint investigation of Cleaview AI's activities conducted in collaboration with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC).

Earlier this month, the OAIC came to the same conclusion as the ICO and ordered Clearview AI to destroy the biometric data it had gathered on Australians and to stop collecting it in the future.

'I believe that posting a photograph to a social networking platform does not obviously imply approval to the gathering of that image by an unknown third party for commercial reasons,' stated Angelene Falk, Australia's Information Commissioner. 

'The secret collecting of this type of sensitive information is unreasonable and unjust,' Falk added. 'It poses a high danger of harm to individuals, especially vulnerable groups like children and crime victims whose photographs may be searched in Clearview AI's database.'

The first patent was issued in relation to the 'usage of large-scale internet data.'

Clearview AI received cease-and-desist letters from major online businesses such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Venmo, requesting that the company stop harvesting photographs and data from their platforms. Clearview AI creator Hoan Ton-That is unapologetically proud of his company's large data-scraping technology, which he says is critical to combating illicit activities such as human trafficking. The startup also claims that their software might be beneficial for learning more about someone they've recently met, such as through romance or business.