Facial recognition company Clearview AI has been fined more than £7.5m by the UK’s privacy watchdog for collecting the facial images of people in Britain from the web and social media.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said that globally the company illegally collected more than 20 billion images of people’s faces to create a global online database for facial recognition.
It has issued an enforcement notice ordering the company to stop obtaining and using the personal data of UK residents and to delete the data on them that it has already collected.
“Given the high number of UK internet and social media users, Clearview AI’s database is likely to include a substantial amount of data from UK residents, which has been gathered without their knowledge,” the ICO stated.
“Although Clearview AI no longer offers its services to UK organisations, the company has customers in other countries, so the company is still using personal data of UK residents.”
