Privacy campaign groups filed legal complaints on Thursday with European regulators against Clearview AI, alleging the facial recognition technology i

European privacy groups challenge facial scan firm Clearview

submited by

Style Pass

2021-05-27 14:00:11

Privacy campaign groups filed legal complaints on Thursday with European regulators against Clearview AI, alleging the facial recognition technology it provides to law enforcement agencies and businesses breaches stringent European Union privacy rules.

Four groups complained to data protection authorities in France, Austria, Greece, Italy and the UK about Clearview's practices. They say the company stockpiled biometric data on more than 3 billion people without their knowledge or permission by “scraping" their images from websites.

The complaints say Clearview didn't have any legal basis to collect and process this data under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, which covers facial image data. Britain adopted its own version of the EU privacy rules after it left the bloc.

“Clearview AI has never had any contracts with any EU customer and is not currently available to EU customers," CEO Hoan Ton-That said in a statement.