Clearview AI and Facial Recognition Privacy Cases

Clearview AI was co-founded by Hoan Ton-That. It drew wide public attention in January 2020, when The New York Times reported that hundreds of law enforcement agencies were quietly using its app. The system crawls websites such as social networks, news sites and photo pages. It downloads images that contain faces and converts each face into a numerical template. A user uploads a probe photo, and the system returns matching images along with the links where they were found. The company has said its database holds tens of billions of images. The legal backlash came quickly. In the United States, the ACLU sued under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which requires informed written consent before a company collects biometric identifiers. The 2022 settlement permanently barred Clearview from selling access to its faceprint database to most private companies nationwide. It also barred sales to Illinois public agencies, including police, for five years. A separate consumer class action settled on unusual terms: class members got a share of the company's future value instead of cash up front, because Clearview said it could not pay a large sum. In 2022, the data protection authorities of Italy, Greece and France each fined Clearview 20 million euros and ordered it to stop processing residents' data and delete it. The Dutch authority later imposed a fine of more than 30 million euros. The UK regulator also issued a fine, which Clearview challenged on jurisdictional grounds. Privacy regulators in Canada and Australia found its collection unlawful. A common misconception is that public photos are fair game. Regulators held that faceprints are biometric data, and that posting a photo does not mean agreeing to have it turned into a searchable identifier. A second misconception is that the fines shut the business down. Clearview has disputed European jurisdiction and still serves government customers elsewhere.