Report says Clarifai deleted 3 million photos provided by OkCupid to train facial recognition AI

According to Reuters, AI platform Clarifai has deleted 3 million photos it allegedly obtained from OkCupid to train its facial recognition AI. The company also removed models trained using that data.

In 2014, Clarify asked OkCupid, whose executives had invested in the company, to share data, according to an FTC investigation. The dating app then provided these user-uploaded photos, along with other demographic and location data, the report said. According to OkCupid’s own privacy policy, this behavior should have been prohibited.

“While we are currently collecting data, we have realized that OKCupid must have a tremendous amount of great data to do so,” Clarify founder and CEO Matthew Seiler wrote in an email to OkCupid co-founder Maxwell Krohn, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters.

Although the incident appears to have happened 12 years ago, the FTC did not begin investigating it until 2019. A New York Times article about Clarify mentioned that the company was building an AI tool that could use images from OkCupid to estimate age, gender, and race based on faces.

The FTC and OkCupid, which is owned by Match Group, settled a lawsuit last month. At the time, OkCupid and Match Group denied claims that they violated their privacy policies and misled users, but Clarifai’s admission that it deleted the data suggests that the companies did indeed access these photos. The FTC also alleged that since 2014, Match Group and OkCupid intentionally attempted to cover up this conduct and obstruct its investigation.

OkCupid and Clarifai did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s requests for comment.

Although the FTC cannot fine companies for first-time offenses of this kind, the agency declared that OkCupid and Match are “permanently prohibited from misrepresenting or assisting others in misrepresenting” the nature of their data collection and sharing. Therefore, OkCupid and Match are prohibited from participating in these activities that are not already permitted by the FTC.