In the United Kingdom, Clearview AI will have to pay a fine of 8.8 million euros for having diverted the portraits of British users on the Internet. You will also have to remove them from your huge database.

Governments make life difficult for Clearview AI, and that’s a good thing. In the United Kingdom, the American company specialized in facial recognition was fined more than 7.5 million pounds sterling (8.8 million euros) for having collected facial images of people in Great Britain from the web and social networks.

In addition to the fine, Clearview AI will have to get rid of its database of British faces. “Given the large number of UK internet and social media users, it is likely that the Clearview AI database includes a substantial amount of data from UK residents, which was collected without their knowledge.said the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), Britain’s data watchdog. Although Clearview AI no longer offers its services to UK organisations, the company has clients in other countries, so the company continues to use the personal data of UK residents.”.

An amount of 17 million pounds mentioned above

The organization also estimates that the company has illegally collected more than 20 billion images of people’s faces around the world to create a global online database for facial recognition. The British authority announced in November 2021 its intention to impose a fine of more than 17 million pounds sterling on the company as part of a joint investigation with its Australian counterpart. Therefore, the final amount of the fine is well below expectations, pending the publication of the investigation report.

In France, in December 2021, the Cnil formally notified the company Clearview AI to cease the collection and use of data from individuals on French territory and to delete this information within two months. But these setbacks don’t stop the company from bloating its database. She estimates that it may reach 100 billion portraits by February 2023.