Privacy International (PI) and several other European privacy and digital rights organizations announced today that they’ve filed legal complaints a

Clearview AI hit with sweeping legal complaints over controversial face scraping in Europe

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2021-05-27 13:00:02

Privacy International (PI) and several other European privacy and digital rights organizations announced today that they’ve filed legal complaints against the controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI. The complaints filed in France, Austria, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom say that the company’s method of documenting and collecting data — including images of faces it automatically extracts from public websites — violates European privacy laws. New York-based Clearview claims to have built “the largest known database of 3+ billion facial images.”

PI, NYOB, Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, and Homo Digitalis all claim that Clearview’s data collection goes beyond what the average user would expect when using services like Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube. “Extracting our unique facial features or even sharing them with the police and other companies goes far beyond what we could ever expect as online users,” said PI legal officer Ioannis Kouvakas in a joint statement.

Clearview AI uses an image scraper to automatically collect publicly available photos of faces across social media and other websites to build out its biometric database. It then sells access to that database — and the ability to identify people — to law enforcement agencies and private companies.

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