The controversial artificial intelligence company Clearview AI has experienced a breach that saw the theft of its entire customer list, which is made up of various law enforcement agencies.
An intruder was able to gain “unauthorized access” to Clearview’s full customer list, the Daily Beast first reported on Wednesday. Clearview AI says that it currently only has contracts with law enforcement agencies and select security professionals.
“Security is Clearview’s top priority,” said Tor Ekeland, an attorney for Clearview AI, in a statement. “Unfortunately, data breaches are part of life in the 21st century. Our servers were never accessed. We patched the flaw, and continue to work to strengthen our security.”
The hacker was reportedly able only to gain access to the company’s customer list, as well as the number of customer’s user accounts and the number of searches a customer conducted.
A privacy advocate previously told Digital Trends that if Clearview’s data ever got into the wrong hands, the software could be utilized to harass and stalk almost anyone. So while this breach only included what customers the company has, it’s troubling to know that the data was accessed so easily and that it could happen in the future, potentially with even more sensitive information.
Clearview works by scraping publicly available data from popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Venmo, and others. Law enforcement uses its technology to identify criminal suspects, as well as victims.
The company got into hot water last month when a New York Times article looked into the company’s advanced and controversial facial-recognition technology.
Since then, Google, YouTube, and Twitter have sent cease-and-desist letters to Clearview, and Facebook is reviewing Clearview’s practices as well.
Clearview AI’s facial-recognition technology is so advanced that it could match your name and address from a simple photo of your face, which many say poses a problem since stalkers would greatly benefit from this kind of software.
Facial-recognition software is nothing new, and many companies have begun to use it in a variety of ways. Amazon’s facial-recognition software can even detect emotions on people’s faces, including fear.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.