23 May 2022

Clearview AI, the controversial facial-recognition firm, has been hit with £7.5m fine for building a database of more than 20 billion images without consent.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) found the company had no lawful reason for collecting people’s information and failed to adequately inform UK residents over the use of their personal data. As well as the £7,552,800 fine, the company has been ordered to delete all data gathered from people in the UK.

Clearview AI first came under fire in 2020 after its database suffered a security breach. 

“The company not only enables identification of those people, but effectively monitors their behaviour and offers it as a commercial service,” said Information Commissioner John Edwards. “That is unacceptable.”

The ICO has issued an enforcement notice ordering Clearview AI to stop obtaining and using the personal data of UK residents that is publicly available on the internet and to delete the data of UK residents from its systems. 

Clearview built its data from scraping billions of publicly available images from social media. Privacy advocates have long condemned the company’s business model, based on allowing its clients to upload an image of a person to the company’s app and check it for a match against all photos in the database.