Facial recognition company Clearview AI scraped billions of photos from public internet sources, including social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, without users' consent. 

According to a New York Times investigation, Clearview AI built a vast database of over 3 billion images using scraped photos, violating the policies of major social media platforms and leading to cease-and-desist orders from Google, Twitter, Facebook and other companies.

The company's actions raised significant privacy concerns, led to increased scrutiny from privacy advocates, technology companies and regulatory bodies, resulted in legal challenges and regulatory actions against the company, and sparked a global debate on the ethics and regulation of facial recognition technology.

Its founder Hoan Ton-That argued that there is a US First Amendment right to access public data, despite the controversy surrounding his firm's practices.