![]() Here’s the CNIL’s summary of Clearview’s breaches: This one comes after it failed to respond to an order last year from the CNIL, France’s privacy watchdog, to stop its unlawful processing of French citizens’ information and delete their data.Ĭlearview responded to that order by, well, ghosting the regulator - thereby adding a third GDPR breach (non-cooperation with the regulator) to its earlier tally. ![]() Unlawful processing of personal data (breach of Article 6 of the GDPR). ![]() Lack of cooperation with the CNIL (Article 31 of the RGPD).Individuals’ rights not respected (Articles 12, 15 and 17 of the GDPR). “Clearview AI had two months to comply with the injunctions formulated in the formal notice and to justify them to the CNIL. However, it did not provide any response to this formal notice,” the CNIL wrote in a press release today announcing the sanction. “The chair of the CNIL therefore decided to refer the matter to the restricted committee, which is in charge for issuing sanctions. ![]() On the basis of the information brought to its attention, the restricted committee decided to impose a maximum financial penalty of 20 million euros, according to article 83 of the GDPR. The EU’s GDPR allows for penalties of up to 4% of a firm’s worldwide annual revenue for the most serious infringements - or €20 million, whichever is higher. But the CNIL’s press release makes clear it’s imposing the maximum amount it possibly can here. Whether France will see a penny of this money from Clearview remains an open question, however. The U.S.-based privacy-stripper has been issued with a slew of penalties by other data protection agencies across Europe in recent months, including €20M fines from Italy and Greece and a smaller U.K. So the GDPR penalties look mostly like a warning to stay away from Europe.Ĭlearview’s PR agency, LakPR Group, sent us this statement following the CNIL’s sanction - which it attributed to CEO Hoan Ton-That: But it’s not clear it’s handed over any money to any of these authorities - and they have limited resources (and legal means) to try to pursue Clearview for payment outside their own borders. There is no way to determine if a person has French citizenship, purely from a public photo from the internet, and therefore it is impossible to delete data from French residents. (NB: On paper the GDPR has extraterritorial reach so its former arguments are meaningless, while its claim it’s not doing anything that would make it subject to the GDPR looks absurd given its amassed a database of over 20 billion images worldwide and Europe is, er, part of Planet Earth… ) The statement goes on to reiterate earlier claims by Clearview that it does not have a place of business in France or in the EU, nor undertake any activities that would “otherwise mean it is subject to the GDPR”, as it puts it - adding: “ Clearview AI’s database of publicly available images is lawfully collected, just like any other search engine like Google.” Clearview AI only collects publicly available information from the internet, just like any other search engine like Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo. Ton-That’s statement also repeats a much-trotted out claim in Clearview’s public statements responding to the flow of regulatory sanctions its business attracts that it created its facial recognition tech with “the purpose of helping to make communities safer and assisting law enforcement in solving heinous crimes against children, seniors and other victims of unscrupulous acts” - not to cash in by unlawfully exploiting people’s privacy - not that, in any case, having a ‘pure’ motive would make any difference to its requirement, under European law, to have a valid legal basis to process people’s data in the first place. “We only collect public data from the open internet and comply with all standards of privacy and law. I am heartbroken by the misinterpretation by some in France, where we do no business, of Clearview AI’s technology to society.
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