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Home/AI Incident Database/Clearview AI builds a facial-recognition database from billions of scraped social media photos and sells it to police

Clearview AI builds a facial-recognition database from billions of scraped social media photos and sells it to police

The New York Times revealed a start-up that had scraped billions of faces from Facebook, YouTube and elsewhere to build a search engine for police, triggering global enforcement and the biometric-scraping precedents of the decade.

Severity: Highclearviewfacial recognitionscrapingbiometrics

At a glance

Organisation: Clearview AI
Industry: Law enforcement and justice
Country or region: Global
Occurred: 1 Jan 2017
Disclosed: 18 Jan 2020
Type of harm: Privacy and personal data exposure, Wrongful arrest and surveillance harm, Regulatory penalties and legal liability

All details 13

Kind of system: Facial recognition
Severity: High
Confirmation: Confirmed by the organisation
Technique: Mass web scraping of images without consent (AML.T0010 supply chain / data collection)
Primary root cause: Policy or governance gap
Scale: Over 30 billion images by 2023; more than €75 million in European fines; BIPA settlement in Illinois
Outcome: Fines and bans in Italy, France, the Netherlands and the UK, a 2022 ACLU settlement barring sales to most US private companies and a 2025 Illinois class settlement; Clearview continued serving US law enforcement.

Sources

nytimes.comhttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html

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