Clarifai removes 3 million photos provided by OkCupid to train facial recognition AI, report says.

AI platform Clarifai scraped 3 million photos it allegedly obtained from OkCupid to train its facial recognition AI, according to Reuters. The company also removed any models that were trained to use the data.

According to the FTC’s investigation, Clarifai asked OkCupid — whose executives once invested in the company — to share data in 2014. The dating app then shared photos taken by users, reports sayalong with other demographic and geographic information. According to OkCupid’s privacy policy, this should have been banned.

“We are gathering information now and have just realized that OKCupid should have more information about this,” Clarifai founder and CEO Matthew Zeiler wrote in an email to OkCupid co-founder Maxwell Krohn, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters.

Although this apparently happened 12 years ago, the FTC did not open an investigation until 2019, when New York Times article Clarifai said the company used photos from OkCupid to create an AI tool that can calculate a person’s age, sex, and race based on their faces.

The FTC and OkCupid, which owns Match Group, dismissed the case last month. At the time, OkCupid and Match Group denied claims that it had defrauded users by violating its privacy policy, but Clarifai’s confirmation that it had deleted the data meant that the company had indeed obtained the photos. The FTC also alleged that since 2014, Match Group and OkCupid intentionally concealed this information and attempted to obstruct its investigation.

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

When the FTC is not able to create companies for this type of first offense, agency he announced that OkCupid and Match are “perpetually prohibited from misrepresenting or assisting others to misrepresent” how they collect and share data. Therefore, OkCupid and Match are prohibited from engaging in this behavior, which is already prohibited by the FTC.