Clearview AI—Controversial Facial Recognition Firm—Fined $33 Million For ‘Illegal Database’
ForbesAUG 20 2024
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 Dutch DPA continued by stating that Clearview had "seriously violated" the EU's GDPR "on several points," claiming that the company "should never have built the database" and has failed to stop regulatory violations or cooperate with requests for access.
Now totaling nearly $100M in European fines alone, Clearview AI 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 gather mounting opposition — threatening individual privacy. Without better international agreements, there is little Europe can do to force the US company to either pay up or wipe its illegal data.
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