On May 23, 2022, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the equivalent of the National Commission for Information and Liberties (CNIL) in the United Kingdom, imposed a fine of 7.5 million pounds sterling (8 .85 million euros). The American start-up specializing in facial recognition technologies for law enforcement has been sanctioned for the illicit use of images of individuals collected on the internet and social networks.
Clearview AI ordered to pay a fine and delete all data on British people
Last July, the ICO already had Clearview AI in its sights. Indeed, the British authority wanted to impose a fine of 17 million pounds sterling (almost 20 million euros) on the American company. With the help of the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the Australian equivalent authority to the ICO, the two bodies have focused on the actions of the company. It did not hesitate to collect freely accessible data on the internet (images, biometric data, etc.) in order to use them to feed its technologies.
Soon data centers on the Moon to save data from all over the world?
A few months later, the verdict falls and forces the company specializing in facial recognition to pay a smaller fine. However, the ICO has issued another measure: it orders Clearview AI to stop collecting and using the public personal data of British residents, as well as to delete those they already have.
Clearview AI would have collected more than 20 billion images on the internet
Clearview AI is known for providing law enforcement with a solution to recognize certain individuals in moments. All you have to do is download a clear image of an individual whose identity you want to know, and the software searches the database to see if there is a match between this image and the one provided by the police.
For this tool to work and be effective, it is therefore necessary to have as much data as possible so that the comparisons are as relevant as possible. Nevertheless, this raises an ethical question about the use of this data. The ICO of course condemned the company for using images of UK residents.
According to the British authority, the company would have collected more than 20 billion snapshots of faces of individuals all over the world in order to store them in a database. All of these images were harvested without information or consent regarding their collection or future use.
Clearview AI, a controversial player in the world of facial recognition
Before the reaction of the United Kingdom, several countries had already expressed their dissatisfaction with the actions of Clearview AI. In France, the CNIL asked the American start-up to stop the ” reuse of photographs accessible on the Internet “. In the United States, its country of origin, the company can no longer sell its database to private companies.
Currently, the startup’s facial recognition technologies are believed to be used by several thousand police departments around the world. It is also used in the context of the war in Ukraine by the Ukrainians to try to identify Russian agents, to try to reunite refugees separated from their families or to identify the dead.