Incident 781: Clearview AI Faces $33.7 Million Fine for Violating GDPR with Biometric Data Harvesting

Description: Clearview AI was fined $33.7 million by the Dutch data protection authority for allegedly creating an illegal facial recognition database by scraping billions of images from the Internet without consent. The company used AI to convert these images into biometric data and sold the service to law enforcement. This act was in violation of privacy laws and the GDPR.

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Alleged: Clearview AI developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed General public.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

781

Report Count

Incident Date

2024-09-03

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Applied Taxonomies

MIT

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified

Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

2.1. Compromise of privacy by obtaining, leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information

Risk Domain

Privacy & Security

Entity

Human

Timing

Post-deployment

Intent

Intentional

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Clearview AI—Controversial Facial Recognition Firm—Fined $33 Million For ‘Illegal Database’

forbes.com

Clearview AI fined by Dutch agency for facial recognition database

reuters.com

forbes.com · 2024

Controversial U.S. facial recognition company Clearview AI, reportedly embraced U.S. government and law enforcement agencies, has been fined more than $30 million by the Netherlands’ data protection watchdog on Tuesday for building “an ille…

reuters.com · 2024

AMSTERDAM, Sept 3 (Reuters) - U.S. facial recognition company Clearview AI has been fined 30.5 million euros ($33.7 million) for building what Dutch data protection watchdog DPA said on Tuesday was an illegal database.

DPA also issued an ad…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.