“Clearview seems to misunderstand the internet as a homogeneous and fully public forum where everything is up for grabs,” commented Lucie Audibert, legal officer at Privacy International, one of a group of four rights groups bringing the complaints. 'It is not a solution that every person has to file own complaint.' An order by the European data protection authorities to remove the faces of all Europeans is long overdue,' Marx told The Reg via email.

'It is long known that Clearview AI has not only me, but many, probably thousands of Europeans in its illegal face database. It did not order the deletion of the photographs, however. The decision by the Hamburg DPA was that Clearview AI had added his biometric profile to its searchable database without his knowledge or consent.

One at a timeīack in January this year,, Chaos Computer Club member Matthias Marx managed to get Clearview to delete the hash value representing his biometric profile - although not the actual images or metadata - after filing a complaint with the Hamburg data protection authorities. The UK-GDPR is almost word for word the same text, and that is purposeful, because any significant divergence from the EU GDPR could affect data sharing adequacy rulings post-Brexit. It first incorporated the law when the UK was a member state, and went on to amend it on 1 January 2021 to be read together with the new 'UK-GDPR' rather than the EU GDPR. The UK (say it with me) despite Brexit, still has the GDPR implemented via the Data Protection Act (DPA) of 2018. The General Data Protection Regulation applies to anyone that processes personal data on the European market.Įven though Clearview.AI is based solely in the US, the GDPR applies to their activities affecting European residents, eg when scraping pictures of Europeans from the web. The business then provides a link to the place it found the 'match'.Īlthough Clearview AI lists mostly US law enforcement agencies as customers on its website and in publicly avowed comments, according to documents cited in the complaint to UK data regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office,, the UK National Crime Agency, the Ministry of Defence and several police forces across England all allegedly have registered users with Clearview AI. Clearview AI's facial recognition tool is trained on images harvested from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and attempts to match faces fed into its machine learning software with results from its multi-billion picture database. The facial recognition company, which is based in the US, claims to have “the largest known database of 3+ billion facial images”. Updated Data rights groups have filed complaints in the UK, France, Austria, Greece and Italy against Clearview AI, claiming its scraped and searchable database of biometric profiles breaches both the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

France data to slap clearview ai