This in spite of being told by Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Venmo and others that the practice violated their terms of service and must be stopped (and being served cease and desist letters by some of these companies).Īs part of a recent settlement over the company’s violation of Illinois biometric privacy laws, it is essentially restricted from doing business with anyone but federal agencies and local police departments in the United States. Clearview AI’s facial recognition data hoarding continues to rack up penaltiesĬlearview AI maintains, as it always has, that it is justified in mass scraping of facial recognition data from public profiles as it is taking material that is made freely available to anyone. The company was found to be in violation of the terms of the UK Data Protection Act 2018. The latter has happened yet again in the United Kingdom, as lead privacy regulator The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has issued a decision after a lengthy investigation conducted in partnership with Australian authorities.Ĭlearview AI will be fined £7,552,800, and has been ordered to stop collecting facial recognition data in the country and to delete all of the data it had previously collected. The OAIC is still finalising a report on the AFP’s trial of the technology and whether it complied with the federal privacy code for government agencies.Clearview AI’s scraping of facial recognition data has created trouble for it around the world, both with the social media platforms it takes material from and governments that have found it in violation of privacy laws. ![]() However, the OAIC report found officers in Australia had successfully searched for suspects, victims and themselves in the Clearview databases. ![]() Police forces in Australia have downplayed their use of the service, and the OAIC’s investigation found Clearview did not have any paid customers in Australia. The OAIC report noted Clearview AI has not offered services to Australian organisations since March 2020, but the commissioner said that didn’t go far enough and all images of people in Australia must be removed. The company also said the images held by Clearview AI were published in the US, not Australia, so Australian privacy law should not apply. In its response to the OAIC, Clearview AI argued its images were collected from the internet without requiring a password or other security clearance. The Australian founder and CEO of Clearview AI, Hoan Ton-That, said he respects the effort the commissioner put into evaluating the technology he built but said he is “disheartened by the misinterpretation of its value to society”. “Not only has the commissioner’s decision missed the mark on the manner of Clearview AI’s manner of operation, the commissioner lacks jurisdiction.” “Clearview AI operates legitimately according to the laws of its places of business,” he said. He said Clearview AI intends to appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Mark Love, a lawyer for BAL Lawyers acting for Clearview AI, said the company had gone to “considerable lengths” to cooperate, and claimed “the commissioner has not correctly understood how Clearview AI conducts it business”. In response to the scandal, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) launched an investigation in cooperation with the UK’s information commissioner office in July 2020. Reports suggested more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies across the globe had been using Clearview’s services in early 2020. Last year, it was revealed the US-based company had offered trial services to police in Australia – specifically Queensland police, Victoria police and the Australian federal police. “The indiscriminate scraping of people’s facial images, only a fraction of whom would ever be connected with law enforcement investigations, may adversely impact the personal freedoms of all Australians who perceive themselves to be under surveillance.”īut Clearview AI has stood its ground, saying it operates legitimately in Australia and intends to appeal the decision.Ĭlearview AI is a facial recognition service that claims to have built up enormous databases – containing more than 3bn labelled faces – through the controversial practice of scraping photos from Facebook and other social media sites. “When Australians use social media or professional networking sites, they don’t expect their facial images to be collected without their consent by a commercial entity to create biometric templates for completely unrelated identification purposes,” commissioner Angelene Falk said.
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