Clearview's controversial facial recognition technology is getting closer to being patented by the US Patent and Trademark Office. The USPTO has given Clearview a "notice of allowance", a sign that the startup's patent application will be approved once it pays administrative costs, Politico reported. Clearview said it has scraped ten billion photos from public social media accounts. Although companies like Instagram and Twitter disapprove, Clearview has continued to download these images without permission. Now, its methods and software are may be officially patented. Clearview's application describes a "downloading by a web crawler facial images of individuals and personal information associated therewith; and storing the downloaded facial images and associated personal information in the database."