Now in the fourth country, Clearview AI, which runs a database that feeds facial recognition algorithms, is forced to delete the individuals’ image.
Clearview AI, one of the most controversial direct-to-face businesses in the Western world, has been completely banned in another country after Australia, France and Italy. The UK’s data protection authority, the ICO, has ordered the image of all British citizens to be removed from the database and ordered the company to pay a fine of £7.5 million (about $9.4 million).
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The ICO was investigated last year in connection with Clearview AI’s activities in the UK, and the outcome of the case can be encapsulated based on the organization’s initial position at the time. Thus the local data protection authority mainly complained that although the company had previously cooperated with local law enforcement agencies, these agreements later lapsed, but the images collected by British citizens in the meantime were used by Clearview for the purposes of commercial.
However, based on the company’s past statements on similar cases, it is at least doubtful whether the decision to clean the database was beneficial: data protection legislation.