Noyb demands criminal sanctions against Clearview AI for GDPR violations

The Austrian privacy organization noyb has lodged a criminal complaint against Clearview AI and its managers with the public prosecutors in Austria for repeatedly ignoring European privacy laws.

Clearview AI is an American technology company that offers facial recognition technology to police and law enforcement agencies worldwide. For this purpose, the company has created a database consisting of billions of profile photos and other images. Experts estimate that this database contains more than 60 billion photos.

To collect these pictures, Clearview uses scraping software. This is, simply put, a computer program that automatically searches the internet for usable photos and adds them to the database. The images come from social media and other public sources, including personal websites and blogs.

Data protection authorities (DPAs) across several European Member States have repeatedly warned Clearview that collecting and processing pictures and biometric data from European data subjects without their consent is a breach of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Privacy regulators from France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have imposed hefty fines for these GDPR violations in recent years, totaling an amount of approximately €100 million.

Instead of challenging these fines, Clearview chose to ignore the DPAs, who don’t have the means to enforce fines against the company. Therefore, noyb is going on the offensive and has filed a criminal complaint against Clearview with the Austrian public prosecutors, invoking Article 84 of the GDPR that allows EU Member States to demand criminal sanctions for GDPR violations.

“Facial recognition technology is extremely invasive. It allows for mass surveillance and immediate identification of millions of people. Clearview AI has amassed a global database of photos and biometric data, which makes it possible to identify people within seconds. Such power is extremely concerning and undermines the idea of a free society, where surveillance is the exception instead of the rule,” Max Schrems, Chairman of noyb, says in a public statement.

“Clearview AI seems to simply ignore EU fundamental rights and just spits in the face of EU authorities,” he adds.

If successful, Clearview AI and its executives could face jail time and be held personally liable.

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