Clearview AI Fined $34M By Dutch Watchdog For ‘Illegal Database’ Supporting Facial Recognition
Clearview AI Fined $3334M Million By Dutch Watchdog For ‘Illegal Database’ Supporting Facial Recognition
The Facts
US facial recognition company Clearview AI has been fined approximately $33.7M by the Netherland's data protection authority for breaching the European Union's General Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Releasing a statement on Tuesday, the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) claimed that Clearview holds "an illegal database with billions of photos of faces," including Dutch citizens, which have been scraped from the internet without consent.
The Spin
Now totalling nearly $100M in European fines alone, Clearview continues to engage in highly illegal and unethical activity by refusing to remove EU data from their systems. Facial recognition is a surveillance tool that continues to attract mounting opposition, threatening individual privacy and promoting dystopian control mechanisms.
Despite widespread public outrage, Clearview AI's controversial business model highlights the continued limitations of current cross-border AI regulation. Without international agreements, there is little Europe can do to force the US company to either pay up or wipe its illegal data.
