Clarifai deletes 3 million photos after FTC settlement with OkCupid

The artificial-intelligence platform Clarifai has deleted 3 million photos and the AI models trained on that data. The deletion follows a settlement between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)—the US regulator—and dating app OkCupid alongside its parent company, Match Group. According to reports from Reuters, Clarifai obtained the user photos from OkCupid to train its facial recognition AI. The settlement concludes a multi-year dispute over unauthorized data sharing.

The data sharing began in 2014 when Clarifai asked OkCupid to share user data. At the time, OkCupid executives had invested in Clarifai. Internal emails from 2014 reveal that Clarifai founder and CEO Matthew Zeiler actively sought the data from OkCupid co-founder Maxwell Krohn. “We’re ⁠collecting data now and just realized that OKCupid must have a HUGE amount of awesome data for this,” Zeiler wrote, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters. The dating app subsequently provided the user-uploaded photos, along with demographic and location data, to the AI startup. Under OkCupid’s own privacy policies, this data sharing behavior should have been prohibited.

Although the data sharing appears to have taken place 12 years ago, the FTC did not open an investigation until 2019. The regulator launched the probe after a New York-based report surfaced, which mentioned that Clarifai had used images from OkCupid to build an AI tool that could estimate someone’s age, sex, and race based on their face. The FTC and OkCupid settled the resulting lawsuit last month. At the time of the settlement, OkCupid and Match Group did not admit to the allegations, but Clarifai’s confirmation of the deletion implies that the AI company did indeed access the photos.

The FTC alleged that OkCupid and Match Group “deceived users by violating its own privacy policies” by sharing the data. The regulator also asserted that Match Group and OkCupid “deliberately concealed this behavior and attempted to obstruct its investigation” since 2014. While the FTC cannot fine the companies for this first-time offense, the agency declared that OkCupid and Match Group are permanently prohibited from misrepresenting or assisting others in misrepresenting the nature of their data collection and sharing.

Why it matters

The FTC settlement highlights the growing regulatory scrutiny on data sharing practices between companies and AI developers, specifically regarding the use of user-uploaded photos for facial recognition training without proper consent.