The companys real business model wasnt properly disclosed to consumers who visited the Ever website or app, the report said.
Ever had argued at the time it wasnt sharing peoples private photos or any identifying information with its facial recognition customers. Instead, it had used the billions of images its customers had uploaded to build an algorithm that can learn from matches and is now able to train itself on other data.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California said the business was an egregious violation of peoples privacy, as few knew their family photos were being used to build surveillance technology.
While other companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, have built out facial recognition technology products of their own in recent years, they do so using public data sets.
In a July press release, the company announced it had achieved top-two accuracy globally on the National Institute of Standards and Technology Face Recognition Vendor Test July 27 report focused on face recognition with masks.
Its also notable that Ever is attempting to use the current focus on tech company monopolies as a way to redirect blame for the Ever app shutdown.
Today, Apple, Google and other tech giants are under antitrust investigations in the U.S., as the government works to determine if these companies have used their platform status to damage or even eliminate their competition.