Clearview Stole My Face and the EU Can’t Do Anything About It

Marx claims that his face has been taken. The German activist has pale and wide eyes. Three companies have mapped these features without his consent. Billions of others' faces have been turned into a search term without their consent.

In 2020 Marx read a story about a company that uses photos from the internet to create a database of faces. Law enforcement agencies can use the company's facial recognition technology to find other online photos with the same face.

Marx asked if the company had any photos of him in its database, so he sent an email to Clearview. He got a reply a month later. Marx looked fresh faced in a blue T-shirt as he took part in a competition for engineers in pictures that were ten years old. Marx was aware of the pictures. He didn't know a photographer was selling them without his permission.

Marx said that the revelation was a wake-up call. He says he isn't in control of what people do with his data. It was obvious to him that Clearview was violating Europe's privacy law by using his face or fingerprints without his consent. He filed a complaint in February 2020. It is not clear if the case has been resolved after the first complaint was filed. Marx has not been informed of the outcome of the case, despite the fact that the case had been closed. Marx, who works as a security researcher at the IT security company Security Research Labs, says the case is still open almost two and a half years after he complained about Clearview. It is the first case of its kind and it is too slow.

Millions of people's faces are being displayed in search engines across Europe. European regulators are struggling to enforce the strictest privacy laws in the world. Other people and privacy groups have followed Marx's lead. The French data protection authority was fined 20 million euro for violating European privacy rules. The fines issued by regulators in Italy and Greece are still not paid. Privacy rules prevented France from revealing details about the payment. Europe's regulators are trying to figure out how to make the company obey their warnings. The other companies that monetize people's faces are not the only ones.

Marx doesn't think it's possible for Clearview to permanently remove a face. He thinks that Clearview's technology would find and catalog him all over again because it is constantly crawling the internet for faces. Clearview didn't reply to a question about whether it could permanently remove people from its database.