Renderos

BACKGROUND

I. Our recitation of the facts is based primarily on the allegations of plaintiffs’ complaint, a declaration by Clearview’s general counsel submitted in support of the motion to strike, and deposition testimony of the declarant submitted by plaintiffs in opposition. According to Clearview, it collects only publicly available images from the internet, along with the associated webpage URL and image metadata. Plaintiffs allege in their complaint that the collection is nonetheless done in violation of many websites’ terms of service, and without notice to, or consent by, the individuals who are depicted in the photos. Clearview populates a database with the collected information and with the “facial vectors” or biometric identifiers Clearview has created by applying its machine-learning algorithm to the images. The database is accessible by an application (app) available to licensed users. When the user uploads a probe photo to the app, the app applies its algorithm to the photo to create a facial vector that it compares against those in the database, and then returns potential matching images with their associated webpage URLs. According to the complaint, by default…