Outside the United States, Clearview AI’s business model is under threat. Australia and Canada have forced the company to shutter its local operations; France, Italy and the United Kingdom have imposed fines; and a posse of European regulators has launched probes.
These vastly different regulatory landscapes suggest that Clearview’s future success — or failure — could become emblematic of the growing gulf between privacy standards in the US and the rest of the world. The company’s fate may also reveal whether a tech business can prosper when confined to the privacy regimes of US states.
Falling foul of BIPA would expose Clearview to the risk of substantial damages, as well business practice changes in Illinois. When added to the lawsuit in the north-eastern US state of Vermont, the image-scraping company could be facing damages claims worth hundreds of millions of dollars — well in excess of the 20 million euro fine imposed by Italy’s privacy regulator.
It’s unclear whether the US judge hearing the case in Chicago will accept Clearview’s arguments. But that defence now appears unlikely to gain traction in the Vermont case, where the state’s attorney-general is suing Clearview over its database of images scraped from social media. The Vermont judge said Clearview wasn’t covered by Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which protects interactive online platforms from liability for third-party content.
[Ton-That said] he respected ‘the time and effort that the Australian officials spent evaluating aspects of the technology I built’ but that he was ‘disheartened by the misinterpretation of its value to society’The Australian Federal Police accepted the ruling but noted that the fight against child exploitation involved offenders using “sophisticated and continuously evolving operation methods to avoid detection” and, therefore, online tools needed to be part of the force’s response.
In the UK, the joint investigation with Australia culminated in the November 2021 announcement that the Information Commissioner would request a fine of more than £17 million and would ban Clearview from processing UK citizens’ data, as part of a provisional enforcement action.
New developments in France are imminent too, as the country’s data protection authority in February gave Clearview two months to respond to questions about its use of biometric data without a legal basis. The regulator also ordered the company to stop collecting and using photographs and videos of people in France and told Clearview that it must help people exercise their right to have their data erased.
You can put your details on social media for the whole world to see...but law enforcement can't use it to find wanted offenders ?
Horrifying and Orwellian
Never put your face on Facebook