Clearview AI was fined €30.5 million by Dutch data protection authorities for illegally building a facial recognition database containing billions of photos scraped from social media and the internet without consent.
U.S. facial recognition company Clearview AI was fined €30.5 million ($33.7 million) by the Netherlands' data protection authority (DPA) for building an illegal database containing billions of faces scraped from social media and the internet. The Dutch watchdog said Clearview automatically harvested photos without people knowing or consenting, converting them into unique biometric codes per face. Clearview sells these facial recognition services to law enforcement and intelligence agencies who use the system to identify people in images. The company's database reportedly contains 30-50 billion photos according to various sources, with the CEO claiming enough images for five photos of every person on the planet. The DPA imposed an additional non-compliance penalty of up to €5 million. Clearview's chief legal officer disputed the fine, claiming the company has no business presence in the Netherlands or EU and is not subject to GDPR regulations. This is one of multiple fines Clearview has received across Europe, with previous penalties of around €20 million each from Italy, Greece, France, and a $9 million fine from the UK. The Dutch regulator acknowledged difficulty enforcing compliance against the American company and warned that European entities using Clearview's services could face hefty fines.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems that memorize and leak sensitive personal data or infer private information about individuals without their consent. Unexpected or unauthorized sharing of data and information can compromise user expectation of privacy, assist identity theft, or cause loss of confidential intellectual property.
AI system
Due to a decision or action made by an AI system
Intentional
Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed