Clearview AI Used Your Face. Now You May Get a Stake in the Company
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
That's not fixing the problem. That's embracing it, and also giving a greenlight to all the other prospective AI data abusers watching the case.
If you want to fix it, rip this company apart. Investors (who should've known what was happening) get zero. Data gets clawed back. Etc.
Why would plaintiffs settle with an attaboy for the abusers like this?
> The plaintiffs’ lawyers would also be paid from the eventual sale or cash-out; they said they would ask for no more than 39 percent of the amount received by the class. (Thirty-nine percent of $52 million would be about $20 million.)
Are big class action suits like this ever done in the public interest?
Like, as pro bono work by lawyers who are already wealthy, and their only goal is to do what's good for society?
I don’t want a stake. I want this company to not exist.
If the suit started with the plaintiffs who had been violated, and they went and sought a law firm to bring suit, then the relief might be different.
It's hard to bring suits like this pro bono. I have a court-appointed pro bono lawyer for a suit against the government right now that goes into settlement next month. I've had to weigh up several times the issue of whether I want settlement money, vs. fixing the constitutional violations for hundreds of thousands of people. Each time I've gone for the ethical option, but it looks like I might get both at the finish line; but only because the defendant is left with the option of going to trial and losing and then having to pay probably close to a million dollars to my lawyer, or settle with me and my lawyer gets nothing for all the hundreds of hours him and his whole team have put into the case.
These cases require inordinate amounts of legal and clerical work to see them through to a solution. I've never seen relief like the one in this case, which seems bizarre though.
> The facial recognition start-up doesn’t have the funds to settle a class-action lawsuit
Too bad! All these corporations keep throwing excuses like this. Can I do that even for something as simple as a library fine or parking ticket?
Or maybe class action lawsuits are giving more money to the lawyers than the people who are damaged, and the net effect on society is still damage.
All the information they collected should be provably destroyed.
The problem with that, from the perspective of the lawyers, is there's no way for them to get paid, as it stands now:
> The plaintiffs’ lawyers would also be paid from the eventual sale or cash-out; they said they would ask for no more than 39 percent of the amount received by the class. (Thirty-nine percent of $52 million would be about $20 million.)
"If" and "could" are doing some heavy lifting there.
This is all dependent upon the value of Clearview, a company who fucked up so hard that they got themselves into this legal mess almost immediately after they started business, and whose leaders have creepily tracked and harassed users of their own product[1]. The decision makers are still allowed to have their majority say, and now you're incentivizing the victims to support Clearview pushing the boundaries of privacy because it's now in their best financial interest to do so.
This is absolute garbage.
Yes, that’s the intended effect. I would like this company’s head metaphorically on a pike next to the road into town as a warning to others.