Clearview AI fined $33 million and declared “illegal”

A Dutch data security watchdog has issued a hefty fine to the US facial recognition company and prohibited the use of Clearview AI services.

The Dutch Data Protection Authority (Dutch DPA) slapped a €30.5 million ($33.7 million) fine on Clearview AI, claiming that the company “has built an illegal database with billions of photos of faces, including of Dutch people.”

New York-headquartered Clearview AI is a facial recognition firm that provides software to law enforcement, government agencies, and other organizations. The company enables its customers to find people's identities based on visual input.

“For this purpose, Clearview has a database with more than 30 billion photos of people. Clearview scrapes these photos automatically from the internet and then converts them into a unique biometric code per face. Without these people knowing this and without them having given consent for this,” the Dutch DPA said.

According to Aleid Wolfsen, the chairman of the Dutch DPA, said that Clearview AI provides services to entities outside of the European Union and the use of intrusive tech such as facial recognition should be clearly regulated.

“The police, for example, have to manage the software and database themselves in that case, subject to strict conditions and under the watchful eye of the Dutch DPA and other supervisory authorities,” Wolfsen said.

We have reached out to Clearview AI for comment and will update the article once we receive a reply.

The Dutch DPA has also issued a warning to Clearview AI customers, claiming that the company is breaking the law. This makes the use of its services illegal. Organizations that continue to use Clearview AI services risk getting fined themselves.

“Clearview should never have built the database with photos, the unique biometric codes, and other information linked to them. This especially applies to the codes. Like fingerprints, these are biometric data. Collecting and using them is prohibited. There are some statutory exceptions to this prohibition, but Clearview cannot rely on them,” the Dutch DPA said.

The privacy watchdog has added that Clearview AI refuses to cooperate with requests to reveal what type of individual data is included in its “illegal” database.

“Such a company cannot continue to violate the rights of Europeans and get away with it. Certainly not in this serious manner and on this massive scale. We are now going to investigate if we can hold the management of the company personally liable and fine them for directing those violations. That liability already exists if directors know that the GDPR is being violated, have the authority to stop that, but omit to do so, and in this way consciously accept those violations,” Wolfsen said.

Clearview AI has been battling European privacy watchdogs for years, with regulators in France, Austria, Italy, Greece, and the United Kingdom alleging that the company uses “automated data scrapers.”

In October 2022, France imposed a €20 million fine on Clearview. Last year, Clearview AI won a case against the United Kingdom’s privacy watchdog and overturned another massive fine imposed on the firm.