Controversial facial-recognition firm Clearview AI received a multimillion-pound fine for building a database of more than 20 billion images without informing people or gaining their consent.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) found the company did not have a lawful reason for collecting people’s information and failed to adequately inform UK residents over the use of their personal data. As a result, Clearview AI has been fined £7,552,800 and ordered to delete all data gathered from people in the UK.
Clearview AI first came under fire in 2020 after its database - built from scraping billions of publicly available images from social media - suffered a security breach. However, privacy advocates have long condemned the company's business model, based on allowing its clients to upload an image of a person to the company’s app and check it for a match against all photos in the database.
“The company not only enables identification of those people...