Overview
- Clarifai says it deleted about 3 million OkCupid user photos and all facial-recognition models trained on them, and it certified the purge to the Federal Trade Commission.
- The company told Representative Lori Trahan’s office that it had not shared the OkCupid data with outside parties and that any models built from it were removed.
- OkCupid and parent Match Group settled with the FTC over a 2014 data handoff that violated the app’s own privacy promises, with an order barring future misrepresentations and no fines due to the agency’s limited authority.
- Court records show Clarifai’s founder sought OkCupid data in 2014 while some OkCupid executives were Clarifai investors, including an email touting OkCupid’s “huge amount of awesome data.”
- The case has turned political, as Trahan called the deletion a step in the right direction and an FTC spokesperson rejected Democratic criticism as baseless.