Clearview AI Hit With Dozens of Lawsuit in Europe Over Method of Collecting Data

Clearview AI is being hit by lawsuits due to its questionable methods. The Privacy International, or PI, and several other European privacy and digital rights organizations announced on May 27 that they have filed legal complaints against the controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI.

Clearview AI Lawsuit

The complaints filed in France, Greece, Austria, Italy, and the United Kingdom say that the company's method of documenting and collecting data, including images of faces it automatically extracts from public websites, violates European privacy laws.

The New York-based Clearview AI claims to have created the largest known database of 3 billion facial images, according to The Verge.

Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, PI, NYOB, and Homo Digitalis all claim that Clearview AI's data collection goes beyond what the average user would expect when using services like LinkedIn, Instagram, or YouTube.

Ioannis Kouvakas, a PI legal officer, said in a statement that extracting their unique facial features, or even sharing them with the police and other companies goes far beyond what they could ever expect as online users.

Clearview AI uses an image scraper to automatically collect publicly available photos of faces across social media, and other public websites to build out its biometric database. It then sells access to that database, and the ability to identify people, to law enforcement agencies and private companies.

The legality of Clearview AI's approach to building its facial recognition service is the subject of a number of legal challenges globally.

The authorities in the United Kingdom and Australia opened a privacy probe in 2020 into the company's data scraping techniques, Fortune reported.

Clearview AI's Controversy

In February, Canada's privacy commissioners determined that Clearview AI's face scraping is illegal and creates a system that inflicts broad-based harm on all members of society, who find themselves continually in a police lineup.

Swedish police were fined by the country's data regulator of using Clearview AI's offering to unlawfully identify citizens, and in one case in Germany, the Hamburg Data Protection Agency ordered Clearview AI to delete the mathematical hash representing a user's profile after he complained.

In the United States, Clearview was sued by the American Civil Liberties Union in the state of Illinois in 2020 for violating the Illinois Biometric Privacy Act, alleging the that company illegally collected and stored data on Illinois citizens without their knowledge or consent, and then sold access to its technology to law enforcement and private companies.

ACLU attorney Nathan Free Wessler wrote in a blog post that the company has offered up a massive faceprint database to private companies, police, federal agencies, and wealthy individuals, allowing them to secretly track, and target whomever they wished using face recognition technology.

The results of that lawsuit contributed to the company's decision to stop selling its product to private US companies. Clearview AI also faced legal action in Vermont, California, and New York.

Privacy International say regulators have three months to respond to the complaints. In the meantime, you can request any data Clearview AI might have on you through the email and forms provided on its site, and ask that your face be omitted from client searches.

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Written by Sophie Webster