People look for an alternative to Clearview AI for different reasons. An agency’s counsel may not want to defend a web-scraped database in court. A city may have a policy that rules it out. A private business may have learned it cannot buy it at all: under a 2022 settlement with the ACLU, Clearview is permanently barred, nationwide, from making its faceprint database available to most private companies.

Whatever brings you here, most comparison lists rank tools on match accuracy and price. Both matter. But the question that decides whether a tool is defensible comes first. What is in the database you are searching against?

Two different kinds of face technology

Open-web face search compares a face against images gathered from the public internet. What comes back is a set of similar-looking faces and the pages they were found on. Any one of those images could be someone else’s photo, reposted by someone else, attached to someone else’s name. In September, reporting first published by Wired described a Clearview prototype called InquiryIQ that uses xAI’s Grok model to connect a face match to associates, social accounts and other personal details. That is a step further from “is this the same person?” and closer to building a profile.

Record-bound identification compares only against records that law enforcement has already created through due process: bookings, warrants, convictions, registrations, missing-person reports. The question is narrow. Does this person match a specific, verified record?

These are different products for different jobs. The mistake is buying one while believing you have the other.

Six questions to ask any vendor

1. Can you name every source in the comparison set? If the answer includes “publicly available images,” ask which sites, and whether those people consented.
2. Does the set include social media, news photos or scraped images? A yes is not automatically disqualifying for every use. It is a fact your counsel will need.
3. Is the comparison one-to-one or one-to-many, and when? Confirming that two images show the same person is a different act from searching a face against millions.
4. What happens to the probe image and to non-matches? Ask how long they exist and whether any template is stored.
5. Who reviews a result before anyone acts on it? Look for a trained human, a documented checklist and a rule that a match alone is never grounds for an arrest.
6. How do you handle state biometric law where we operate? Illinois, Texas and Washington have their own statutes, and a growing number of cities set rules of their own.

Where Safience fits

Safience is a record-bound identity service. It is not an open-web search engine, and it does not try to be.

• UMbRA, the law-enforcement-sourced identity database, holds 58.4M+ records and draws on nothing else. No social media, no news, no commercial data.
• QAPLA one-to-one face comparison lets an investigator confirm whether two images show the same person.
• RTIS, the Real-Time Threat Identification System, tells a facility when someone matching a relevant, verified record is on site, after a trained analyst has reviewed the match.
• RVIS, the Real-Time Victim Identification System, helps identify and locate missing and trafficked people.

Non-matches are deleted immediately and no biometric template is kept. Safience never receives, records or stores video.

If your investigation depends on finding a face anywhere on the internet, Safience is not that tool. If it depends on knowing whether a person matches a verified law-enforcement record, and being able to explain exactly how you found out, it is.

For a plain-language account of what goes into the database and what never does, read What goes into UMbRA. For the full product set, see Safience solutions.

Frequently asked questions

Is Safience a direct replacement for Clearview AI?

No. Clearview searches images collected from the open web. Safience compares only against verified law-enforcement records, so it answers a narrower question with a documented source behind every result.

Can private businesses use Safience?

Yes. Casinos, hospitals, banks and other facilities receive a reviewed alert when someone on site matches a record relevant to that setting. They never browse or search the database themselves.

Does Safience use social media or scraped photos?

No. Every record comes from a law-enforcement or criminal-justice source.

Does Safience store faces of people who are not a match?

No. A non-matching image is deleted immediately and no biometric template is created or kept.

Sources

• ACLU, “In Big Win, Settlement Ensures Clearview AI Complies With Groundbreaking Illinois Biometric Privacy Law,” 9 May 2022. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/big-win-settlement-ensures-clearview-ai-complies-with-groundbreaking-illinois
• Crypto Briefing, “Clearview AI quietly tests InquiryIQ tool powered by xAI’s Grok model,” 10 Sep 2026, citing Wired. https://cryptobriefing.com/clearview-ai-inquiryiq-grok-xai/

Featured photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash.