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Madison Square Garden was among the companies named as a client of Clearview AI, a controversial tech company that provides a facial recognition tool that has raised alarms about privacy, in a BuzzFeed News report Thursday. MSG, however, denies that it is a client and says that it used Clearview as a test. The New York Times reports that Clearview is able to match up photos of people with images of them on the internet, allowing users to identify people with a high level of sophistication and speed. “We demoed the product last year and didn’t even move forward with a trial,” an MSG spokesperson said in a statement. Madison Square Garden does use facial recognition at the arena, as part of what it says is a number of security procedures.
The client list of Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition app being used by US law enforcement to identify suspects and other people, has been leaked. Its customers reportedly include not only law enforcement agencies like ICE and the Justice Department, but also companies like retail giant Macy's and the NBA. BuzzFeed News' Thursday report cited an internal document it obtained.
For a company that maintains its tools are for law enforcement, Clearview’s client list includes a startling number of private companies in industries like entertainment (Madison Square Garden and Eventbrite), gaming (Las Vegas Sands and Pechanga Resort Casino), sports (the NBA), fitness (Equinox), and even cryptocurrency (Coinbase). "While we conducted a limited test as we do with an array of potential vendors, we are not and have never been a client of this company," an NBA spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.
Jared Kushner personally ordered a software developer at his newspaper to remove stories that were critical of his friends and real estate peers. Now a senior White House adviser and son-in-law to President Donald Trump, Kushner in 2012 went around the editorial leaders at the New York Observer — the newspaper he owned and operated — to mandate the removal of a handful of articles from the website, according to emails obtained by BuzzFeed News. [...] The disappearing act included more mundane fare: a 2012 story about NBA Commissioner Adam Silver purchasing a $6.75 million apartment in a tony New York City building, the kind of item that privacy-conscious famous people often try to keep out of the real estate press. Silver and Kushner are friends, and the NBA commissioner praised Kushner in a 2016 New Yorker article for helping the league find space for a retail store.
Despite his reputation as a happy warrior, Cuban isn’t joining the fray for the fun of it. If the wild demand for these thousand-dollar boards persists, vast amounts of money will change hands. And the owner of the idea behind them — if the idea can be owned at all — stands to make a fortune in licensing fees and reselling deals. “I think this could be a huge industry,” Cuban wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News. If he’s right, this suit may play the defining role in determining its shape.
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