LONDON — Britain’s top privacy regulator has no power to sanction an American-based AI firm which harvested vast numbers of personal photos for its facial recognition software without users' consent, a judge has ruled.
The New York Times reported in 2020 that Clearview AI had harvested billions of social media images without users’ consent.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) took action against Clearview last year, alleging it had unlawfully collected the data of British subjects for behavior-monitoring purposes.
Lawyers have pointed out that the company was under no obligation to purge Brits’ pictures from its database until the appeal was determined — and yesterday’s ruling applied not only to the fine, but the deletion order too.
The identity-matching technology, trained on photos scraped without permission from social media platforms and other internet sites, was initially made available to a range of business users as well as law enforcement bodies.
Following a 2020 lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, the company now only offers its services to federal agencies and law enforcement in the U.S. Yesterday’s judgment revealed it also has clients in Panama, Brazil, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.
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LONDON — Britain’s top privacy regulator has no power to sanction an American-based AI firm which harvested vast numbers of personal photos for its facial recognition software without users' consent, a judge has ruled.
The New York Times reported in 2020 that Clearview AI had harvested billions of social media images without users’ consent.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) took action against Clearview last year, alleging it had unlawfully collected the data of British subjects for behavior-monitoring purposes.
Lawyers have pointed out that the company was under no obligation to purge Brits’ pictures from its database until the appeal was determined — and yesterday’s ruling applied not only to the fine, but the deletion order too.
The identity-matching technology, trained on photos scraped without permission from social media platforms and other internet sites, was initially made available to a range of business users as well as law enforcement bodies.
Following a 2020 lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, the company now only offers its services to federal agencies and law enforcement in the U.S. Yesterday’s judgment revealed it also has clients in Panama, Brazil, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.
The original article contains 627 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!