The ICO provisionally issues £17 million fine against facial recognition company Clearview AI

Following PI’s submissions before the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), as well as other European regulators, the ICO has announced its provisional intent to fine Clearview AI.

Clearview AI is a company whose business model relies on scraping billions of publicly available images from the web. These images are then stored indefinitely in a database and the facial features of the people depicted in them are extracted and hashed. Clearview AI then sells access to the database to its clients, who have reportedly ranged from private companies or employers to law enforcement authorities and police across the world, and who are able to use the software to identify faces.

PI welcomes the ICO’s provisional findings which largely reflect the arguments put forward in the submissions we made before it in May 2021. In May 2021, similar complaints and submissions, together with 3 other organisations (Homo Digitalis, Hermes Center and noyb), were lodged with the French, Italian, Greek and Austrian data protection regulators.

An extended version of the article was first published by EDRi member PI here.

Image credit: Privacy International