Clarifai Deletes 3 Million OkCupid Photos in FTC Settlement

Artificial intelligence company Clarifai has deleted approximately three million user photographs obtained from the dating app OkCupid in 2014, along with the facial recognition models trained on that data, as part of a settlement resolving a decade-long Federal Trade Commission investigation into privacy violations.

The data transfer occurred without users' knowledge or consent. Court documents show that in 2014, Clarifai founder and CEO Matthew Zeiler emailed OkCupid co-founder Maxwell Krohn requesting access to the platform's user-generated content. "We're collecting data now and just realized that OKCupid must have a HUGE amount of awesome data for this," Zeiler wrote. OkCupid, owned by Match Group, provided Clarifai with the images, as well as demographic and location information, without a formal agreement, restrictions on use, or any notification to users allowing them to opt out. At the time, OkCupid's privacy policy explicitly prohibited sharing personal data with unaffiliated third parties, a rule the FTC later determined was breached.

The photographs fueled Clarifai's development of facial recognition technology capable of estimating attributes such as age, sex, and...