The UK's privacy watchdog fined Clearview Artificial Intelligence 7.55 million dollars for illegally scraperging the facial images of UK residents from social media and the web. The company was ordered to stop getting the data of UK residents and to remove any that has already been collected. The UK information commissioner said that it was unacceptable.
The UK's Information Commissioner's Office opened a joint investigation with Australia into the company back in 2020, and issued a preliminary fine against the company late last year. Clearview's database is likely to include the data of a substantial number of people from the UK and may have been gathered without people's knowledge from publicly available information online, according to the office.
The company illegally collected more than 20 billion facial images for its database, and the company has customers in other countries.
The app that Clearview sells can be used to try to identify someone by uploading a photo. The data has been used by thousands of public law enforcement agencies despite the technology being in a legal grey area.
The company has received cease-and-desist letters from all of the above mentioned companies, accusing them of violating their terms of service. Facebook demanded that the data be stopped. The company was fined 20 million euro in Italy for receiving complaints from privacy groups.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued Clearview for violating Illinois state laws. The company settled the lawsuit by agreeing to restrict the use of its database in Illinois, though it will still supply it to federal agencies and other states.
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