The New York start-up, which has sucked billions of photographs available on the web, offers a tool to identify a person with their photograph. A practice deemed illegal by the French commission with regard to the GDPR.
Le Monde with AFP
The American Facial Recognition Service Clearview AI was sanctioned on Thursday October 20, of a fine of 20 million euros by the National Commission for Data Protection (CNIL), French authority responsible for protection of the privacy of citizens. This is the maximum amount possible for non-compliance with the European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In addition, the CNIL “enjoins the company Clearview has to stop collecting and using, without legal basis, the data of people in France and to delete those already collected”, added the Commission in a press release .
Clearview AI offers a service to identify a person from their photograph. This software is used by police forces in the United States and in several countries. To function, the company “aspires photographs from many websites, including social networks”, and extract from faces from publicly accessible videos, recalls the CNIL.
“The company has appropriated more than 20 billion images around the world” without informing or collecting the consent of the persons concerned for the processing of biometric data, continues the regulator, which considers that the software de Clearview Ai is “illicit”.
of individuals and the Privacy International association have alerted the commission to these practices since May 2020, which led to the opening of a coordinated survey of the European data protection authorities, then to a formal notice November 26, 2021, therefore remained unanswered.
The company does not intend to submit to the GDPR
Clearview AI now has two months to comply with the injunctions, under penalty of a penalty of 100,000 euros per day of delay. But the New York company does not seem ready to comply.
“There is no way to determine if a person is of French nationality, only from a public photo on the Internet, and it is therefore impossible to delete data from French residents,” said Hoan Ton-That, the boss of Clearview Ai, in a press release sent to the France-Presse agency (AFP). “Clearview AI only collects information accessible to the public on the Internet, like any other search engine such as Google, Bing or DuckduckGo,” he added. In a second press release Mr. Ton-That said that his company had neither commercial brand nor customers in France and in the European Union, and that she did not undertake any activity submitting it to the GDPR.
The American start-up has already been the subject of sanctions in other EU countries, fines of 8.85 million euros in May in the United Kingdom, and 20 million euros in March in Italy. It was also forced to delete the personal data of residents of these two countries. Clearview AI, funded in particular by one of the first Facebook investors, Peter Thiel, agreed this year to no longer sell its biometric databases to companies in the United States, as requested by civil rights associations.