The AI firm Clarifai has officially deleted 3 million user photos previously obtained from the dating app OkCupid, alongside the AI models trained on that data. This action follows a rigorous investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) into how the companies handled sensitive user information.
Data Misuse and Regulatory Scrutiny
The controversy stems from a 2014 arrangement where Clarifai, encouraged by shared executive interests, requested and received massive amounts of user-uploaded photos, demographic details, and location data from OkCupid. According to Reuters, this data transfer directly contradicted OkCupid’s own privacy policies at the time.
Court documents reveal that Clarifai’s founder and CEO, Matthew Zeiler, explicitly sought the data, writing in an email to OkCupid co-founder Maxwell Krohn that the dating app possessed a “HUGE amount of awesome data” for training purposes.
From Discovery to Settlement
While the data harvesting occurred over a decade ago, the FTC only launched an investigation in 2019. This probe was triggered by a New York Times report highlighting how Clarifai utilized the images to build facial recognition tools capable of estimating a person’s age, race, and sex.
Last month, the FTC reached a settlement with OkCupid and its parent company, Match Group. While neither entity admitted to the allegations of deceiving users, the deletion of the data by Clarifai serves as a tacit confirmation of the unauthorized access. Furthermore, the FTC alleged that Match Group and OkCupid actively obstructed the investigation and concealed their data-sharing practices since 2014.
Stricter Oversight for Match Group
Although the FTC was unable to impose financial penalties for this specific first-time offense, the agency issued a strict mandate. According to the FTC’s official statement, OkCupid and Match Group are now permanently prohibited from misrepresenting their data collection and sharing practices. Neither company has provided a comment regarding the latest developments.