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. EXCLUSIVE: The founder of a facial recognition company described as both "groundbreaking" and "a nightmare" is speaking out. 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.

Wild animals are experts at staying out of sight, but a new partnership between Google and the conservation organization Wildlife Insights will try to help scientists capture and analyze pictures of them in their natural habitat. The program will use an artificial intelligence program to sort through photographs taken by small sensor driven camera installations placed in wilderness areas around the world. Google's AI and Cloud services will help researchers analyse and archive the enormous volume of images captured through the program as part of an effort to improve animal conservation strategies all around the world. The camera traps were originally developed in 1990 and in the intervening years have been placed everywhere from Mexico to Madagascar. To date, 4.553 million pictures have been taken from 8,209 camera deployments.

Let's start with some comments about a recent ACLU blog in which they run a facial recognition trial. Using Rekognition, the ACLU built a face database using 25,000 publicly available arrest photos and then performed facial similarity searches of that database using public photos of all current members of Congress. They found 28 incorrect matches out of 535, using an 80% confidence level; this is a 5% misidentification (sometimes called'false positive') rate and a 95% accuracy rate. The ACLU has not published its data set, methodology, or results in detail, so we can only go on what they've publicly said. To illustrate the impact of confidence threshold on false positives, we ran a test where we created a face collection using a dataset of over 850,000 faces commonly used in academia.