The UK’s data protection watchdog has confirmed a penalty for the contentious facial recognition company, Clearview AI, announcing a fine of slightly more than £7.5 million today for a series of violations of local privacy laws.
The watchdog has also issued an enforcement notice, ordering Clearview to stop obtaining and using personal data of UK residents that is publicly available on the internet, as well as to delete UK resident information from its systems.
The US firm amassed a database of 20 billion or more facial images by scraping data from the public internet, such as social media services, to create an online database that it uses to power an AI-based identity-matching service that it sells to entities such as law enforcement.
The issue is that Clearview has never asked individuals if it can use their selfies for this purpose. It has also been found to violate privacy laws in many countries.
The UK’s information commissioner, John Edwards, said in a statement accompanying today’s enforcement:
“Clearview AI Inc has collected multiple images of people all over the world, including in the UK, from a variety of websites and social media platforms, creating a database with more than 20 billion images”.
“The company not only enables identification of those people, but effectively monitors their behaviour and offers it as a commercial service. That is unacceptable. That is why we have acted to protect people in the UK by both fining the company and issuing an enforcement notice.”
“People expect that their personal information will be respected, regardless of where in the world their data is being used. That is why global companies need international enforcement. Working with colleagues around the world helped us take this action and protect people from such intrusive activity.”
“This international cooperation is essential to protect people’s privacy rights in 2022. That means working with regulators in other countries, as we did in this case with our Australian colleagues. And it means working with regulators in Europe, which is why I am meeting them in Brussels this week so we can collaborate to tackle global privacy harms.”
“Given the high number of UK internet and social media users, Clearview AI’s database is likely to include a substantial amount of data from UK residents, which has been gathered without their knowledge,” the UK watchdog also wrote in a press release.
“Although Clearview AI no longer offers its services to UK organizations, the company has customers in other countries, so the company is still using personal data of UK residents,” it added.
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