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AI Privacy Your Rights Online

Clearview Fined Again in France for Failing To Comply With Privacy Orders (techcrunch.com) 20

Clearview AI, the US startup that's attracted notoriety in recent years for a massive privacy violation after it scraped selfies off the Internet and used people's data to build a facial recognition tool it pitched to law enforcement and others, has been hit with another fine in France over non-cooperation with the data protection regulator. From a report: The overdue penalty payment of $5.7M has been issued by the French regulator, the CNIL -- on top of a $22M sanction it slapped the company with last year for breaching regional privacy rules. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets out conditions for processing personal data lawfully. Clearview has been found to have breached a number of requirements set out in law -- by France's CNIL and several other regional data protection authorities, including authorities in the UK, Italy and Greece, garnering several tens of millions in total fines to date. Whether Clearview will ever pay any of these fines remains an open question, since the US-based company has not been cooperating with EU regulators.
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Clearview Fined Again in France for Failing To Comply With Privacy Orders

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  • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @11:43AM (#63511233) Homepage Journal

    Regardless of is Clearview AI pays the fine, this effectively bars them from doing business in the EU. Even if they sell services to EU companies from the US, those customers will then have massive GDPR headaches of their own.

    They are effectively barred from the EU market, but perhaps they don't care. Their product is a massive invasion of privacy, so it was probably always going to be worthless anywhere that people have privacy rights.

  • They will just continue and they will just expense the fine, or just not pay the fine and tie it up in courts. Start revoking their license to do business, and finally if they continue, their corporate charter. Actually do this a few times and they will start paying attention.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Gibgezr ( 2025238 )

      No one can do anything because they are a U.S. company, and only the U.S. can touch them.

    • According to the text of the decision ( https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr... [legifrance.gouv.fr] ) the company Clearview is incorporated in USA. They have no assets in France, no license to operate, nothing that can be done. Best case the watchdog might threten with fines for anyone who uses Clearview services, but how are they going to even know who is a customer of Clearview?

  • by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @12:41PM (#63511411)

    There is a huge legal overlap between the use of public content on the internet for identification and the use of it for AI training. If in the former case the implicit license of public publication is deemed insufficient to grant a right which a contract could grant, why should it not be so in the latter?

    If you want to make Clearview's behaviour illegal in the US without doing the same to OpenAI, you need new legislation IMO. If it happened through the courts now, I doubt they could find a way to ring the needle and differentiate between them.

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