The American facial recognition service Clearview AI was sanctioned this Thursday by the Cnil, the French privacy protection authority, with a fine of 20 million euros, the maximum amount for non-compliance with European data regulations (RGPD).
“Following a request that has remained unanswered, the Cnil imposes a fine of 20 million euros and orders the company Clearview AI to stop collecting and using, without legal basis, the data of people located in France and to eliminate those already collected,” the commission said in a press release.
Clearview AI offers a service to identify a person from their photograph. This software is used by law enforcement agencies in the United States and in various countries.
To work, the company “absorbs photos from a large number of websites, including social networks”, and extracts faces from publicly accessible videos, according to the Cnil.
20 billion images
“The company has appropriated more than 20,000 million images worldwide” without informing or obtaining the consent of the interested parties for the treatment of biometric data, continues the regulator, which therefore considers that the Clearview AI software is “illegal”.
Individuals and the Privacy International association had alerted the Cnil to these practices since May 2020, which had led to the opening of a coordinated investigation by the European data protection authorities, then a formal notice on November 26, 2020. 2021, which went unanswered.
Clearview AI now has two months to comply with the precautionary measures, under penalty of a penalty of 100,000 euros per day of delay.
But the New York company does not seem willing to comply.
“There is no way to determine if a person is a French national, only from a public photo on the Internet, and therefore it is impossible to delete the data of French residents,” said Hoan Ton-That, head of Clearview AI. . in a statement sent to AFP.
In a second press release, Mr. Ton-That specified that his company had neither a commercial sign nor clients in France and the EU and that it did not carry out any activity subject to the GDPR.
The American start-up was also sanctioned in May in the United Kingdom and in March in Italy with fines of 8.85 million euros and 20 million euros, respectively. It was also asked to delete the personal data of residents of these two countries.
Clearview AI, funded in particular by one of Facebook’s early investors, Peter Thiel, agreed this year to stop selling its biometric databases to companies in the United States, as requested by civil rights associations.
Source: BFM TV
