Clearview AI, the US provider of facial recognition services, has agreed to stop working with private companies. The court settlement is the outcome of a 2020 lawsuit initiated by the American Civil Rights Union (ACLU) that focused on collecting mass data without user consent. The agreement formalizes Clearview’s previously announced actions, while also protecting the company from further lawsuits that the American Civil Liberties Union could pursue alleging violations of the Illinois Biometric Data Protection Act.
As part of the agreement, Clearview will restrict access to its database of facial images and may not engage with private companies and individuals, including government employees, who are not acting on behalf of the employer. In addition, the company is trying to remove photos of Illinois residents from its database, while also launching an opt-out program for citizens who want to prevent their personal photos from being used.
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Clearview can continue to work with federal agencies and local police — as long as they are outside of Illinois. Within Illinois, Clearview has been prohibited from selling software, including by state or local law enforcement, for five years.
“By requiring Clearview to comply with biometric data protection laws in Illinois, not just in the state but across the country, it shows that strong data protection laws can provide real protection against abuse. Clearview can no longer use people’s unique biometric identifiers as a source Profit without restrictions Nathan Fred Whistler, deputy director of the Data Protection and Technology Project at the ACLU, said other states should follow Illinois’ lead in enacting biometric data protection laws.
Illinois is the only state to date that has passed a Biometric Data Protection Act, making it the epicenter of activists. Meta (formerly Facebook) pledged $650 million in a BIPA lawsuit last year. Early in 2020, Clearview said it would stop working with private companies and instead focus on working with the thousands of local law enforcement and federal agencies, such as the Department of Justice, which in turn have used the service inconsistently. Under the agreement, such contracts will continue to be allowed outside of Illinois, although Clearview will no longer offer free trial access to individual police officers without the knowledge of their superiors.
Looking back at just five years, Clearview AI creates a “biometric database” of publicly available online recordings used by many law enforcement agencies around the world. Despite a series of privacy concerns and fines, the company has forecast very dynamic growth this year, with a database of hundreds of billions of images planned for the end of the year.
Italy recently ordered the company to pay twenty million euros for violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The New York-based company was fined £17m in the UK last November for a similar reason, and the company has been explicitly banned in several countries, including Sweden, France and Australia, which previously banned ClearView from allowing local residents to. Pictures in any format.
