Dutch DPA imposes a fine on Clearview because of illegal data collection for facial recognition

The Dutch Data Protection Authority (Dutch DPA) imposes a fine of 30.5 million euro and orders subject to a penalty for non-compliance up to more than 5 million euro on Clearview AI. Clearview is an American company that offers facial recognition services. Among other things, Clearview has built an illegal database with billions of photos of faces, including of Dutch people. The Dutch DPA warns that using the services of Clearview is also prohibited. 

Clearview is a commercial business that offers facial recognition services to intelligence and investigative services. Customers of Clearview can provide camera images to find out the identity of people shown in the images. For this purpose, Clearview has a database with more than 30 billion photos of people. Clearview scrapes these photos automatically from the Internet. And then converts them into a unique biometric code per face. Without these people knowing this and without them having given consent for this.

‘Facial recognition is a highly intrusive technology, that you cannot simply unleash on anyone in the world’, Dutch DPA chairman Aleid Wolfsen says. ‘If there is a photo of you on the Internet – and doesn't that apply to all of us? – then you can end up in the database of Clearview and be tracked. This is not a doom scenario from a scary film. Nor is it something that could only be done in China.’

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