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Clearview ai, a New York company that scraped billions of photographs from the public internet to create a facial recognition app used by thousands of US police agencies, will not have to pay a £7.5 million fine, or 9 .1 million dollars, issued by the British government. lead data protection agency. A British appeals court ruled this week that the agency has no jurisdiction over how foreign law enforcement agencies use the data of British citizens.
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Regulators in Australia, Canada and Europe have found that Clearview ai‘s collection of their citizens’ data without consent, including from social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, violated their countries’ privacy laws and ordered the company that will remove the photos of its citizens from its database. In addition to the British fine, data protection agencies in France, Italy and Greece each imposed a fine of 20 million euros, or $21 million, against Clearview ai.
The fines are an existential threat to Clearview ai, which has raised just over $38 million from investors, but it may get them overturned on the same grounds it argued in Britain, said James Moss, a Bird & Bird partner specializing in Data Protection.
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Jack Mulcaire, a lawyer for Clearview ai, said the company was “satisfied” with the decision. Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office said in a statement that the ruling “does not remove the ICO’s ability to take action against internationally based companies that process data from people in the UK, particularly companies that extract data from people in the United Kingdom”. He noted that this case was “a specific exemption around the application of the law abroad.”
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Privacy regulators are concerned about data collected en masse from the Internet. This summer, data protection agencies around the world issued a joint statement warning companies that scrape information from the public Internet that the practice could violate privacy laws.
