Perhaps the saying, "There is no such thing as bad publicity,” holds true for controversial technology companies.
New York-based Clearview AI has been criticized by privacy advocates for years because of the way it has scraped billions of images from social-media networks to build a search engine for faces used by police departments. It was the subject of a New York Times investigation, and several countries including France and Canada have banned the company.
Still, at least 600 law-enforcement agencies have used its technology, and recently Clearview revealed it had offered the government of Ukraine free access to its "facial network” to help stave off the Russian invasion.