The report says Clarifai deletes 3 million photos that OkCupid submitted to train its facial recognition AI

AI platform Clarifai has deleted 3 million photos it says it obtained from OkCupid to train its facial recognition AI, according to Reuters. The company also deleted any models trained using that data.

According to the FTC investigation, Clarifai asked OkCupid — whose executives invested in the company — to share data in 2014. Reports say the dating app then provided these user-uploaded photos, along with other demographic and location data. According to OkCupid’s privacy policies, this behavior should have been prohibited.

“We are collecting data now and just realized that OKCupid must have a huge amount of amazing data for this,” Matthew Zeller, founder and CEO of Clarifai, wrote in an email to OkCupid co-founder Maxwell Krohn, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters.

Although this incident appears to have occurred 12 years ago, the FTC did not open an investigation until 2019, when a New York Times article about Clarifai reported that the company used photos from OkCupid to build an AI tool that could estimate someone’s age, gender, and race based on their face.

The FTC and OkCupid, which is owned by Match Group, settled the lawsuit last month. At the time, OkCupid and Match Group did not acknowledge allegations that they deceived users by violating their privacy policies, but Clarifai’s confirmation that it had deleted the data means the company did have access to those photos. The FTC also alleged that since 2014, Match Group and OkCupid intentionally concealed this behavior and attempted to obstruct its investigations.

OkCupid and Clarifai did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s requests for comment.

While the FTC is unable to fine companies for this type of crime for the first time, the agency announced that OkCupid and Match are “permanently prohibited from misrepresenting or assisting others in misrepresenting” the nature of their data collection and sharing. Therefore, OkCupid and Match are prohibited from engaging in these behaviors, which the FTC does not already permit.