A controversial facial recognition tech company behind a vast face image search engine widely used by cops has been fined approximately $33 million in the Netherlands for serious data privacy violations.
According to the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA), Clearview AI "built an illegal database with billions of photos of faces" by crawling the web and without gaining consent, including from people in the Netherlands.
Clearview AI's technology—which has been banned in some US cities over concerns that it gives law enforcement unlimited power to track people in their daily lives—works by pulling in more than 40 billion face images from the web without setting "any limitations in terms of geographical location or nationality," the Dutch DPA found. Perhaps most concerning, the Dutch DPA said, Clearview AI also provides "facial recognition software for identifying children," therefore indiscriminately processing personal data of minors.
Training on the face image data, the technology then makes it possible to upload a photo of anyone and search for matches on the Internet. People appearing in search results, the Dutch DPA found, can be "unambiguously" identified. Billed as a public safety resource accessible only by law enforcement, Clearview AI's face database casts too wide a net, the Dutch DPA said, with the majority of people pulled into the tool likely never becoming subject to a police search.
"The processing of personal data is not only complex and extensive, it moreover offers Clearview's clients the opportunity to go through data about individual persons and obtain a detailed picture of the lives of these individual persons," the Dutch DPA said. "These processing operations therefore are highly invasive for data subjects."
Clearview AI had no legitimate interest under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for the company's invasive data collection, Dutch DPA Chairman Aleid Wolfsen said in a press release. The Dutch official likened Clearview AI's sprawling overreach to "a doom scenario from a scary film," while emphasizing in his decision that Clearview AI has not only stopped responding to any requests to access or remove data from citizens in the Netherlands, but across the EU.