Questionable facial recognition: civil libertarians file complaints about Clearview AI

Clearview AI has scooped up billions of photos from the web and turned them into a biometrics database for authorities. European activists are calling for "a clear Europe-wide ban on such services".

Clearview AI, a New York-based company specializing in facial recognition, has been in legal trouble in the US for some time. A whole series of complaints against the company is currently underway in several US states. Now they have been joined by European civil rights activists.

An alliance of organizations including Privacy International and noyb ("none of your business") has filed complaints with the data protection authorities of the UK, France, Austria, Italy and Greece.

"What we want to achieve is a clear decision that services like Clearview are illegal in their current form in the EU," says Alan Dahi, privacy lawyer at noyb. That applies even if the providers are based abroad and have no paying customers in the EU, he adds.

Thousands of government customers

Clearview came to prominence in January 2020, when The New York Times revealed the company's business model. According to the report, Clearview automatically searched social networks and thousands of websites for photos of faces, copied them from Twitter and Facebook, among others, without being asked and in violation of the terms of use, and turned them into a database.

This database consists of the photos, a mathematical representation of the faces, and the location where the images were found. Police and other authorities can buy access to it. In the U.S. alone, at least 1800 authorities have done so. They can then, for example, compare photos of suspects taken by surveillance cameras with the Clearview database. If there are likely matches, they are shown the stored images along with their Web address. This can help identify unknown persons.

"Not automatically fair game"

According to the activists, this method violates the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): "European data protection laws are very clear when it comes to the purposes for which companies are allowed to use our data. Extracting our unique facial characteristics or even sharing them with the police and other companies goes far beyond what we as online users could ever expect," says Ioannis Kouvakas of Privacy International. That Europeans are also in Clearview's database has been proven.

"Just because something is online doesn't automatically make it fair game for others to grab in any way they want - that's not moral or legal," says Alan Dahi of noyb. "Data protection authorities need to take action and stop Clearview and similar organizations from grabbing EU citizens' personal data."

Regulators now have three months to provide an initial response to the complaints. The activists expect "a joint decision that Clearview's practices have no place in Europe" and ultimately "a clear Europe-wide ban on such services."

Anyone who wants to find out whether their own photos have been copied from the Net by Clearview must email privacy@clearview.ai.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chrome targeted by criminals: Why users need to update quickly now

A security vulnerability in Google Chrome is currently being exploited by cyber criminals. Malware could land on your PC through it. Read here how you can protect yourself. The Google Chrome browser is currently struggling with some security vulnerabilities. In a blog post , Google warns about a total of seven vulnerabilities, with the majority of these gaps being classified as a "high" threat to users. The vulnerabilities have been fixed in the latest version of Chrome for Windows, Linux and macOS. If you have Chrome version 90.0.4430.85 installed, it can no longer be exploited. If you have an older version of the browser installed, you should update urgently. You can find the download of the new version below these lines. Smartphone users do not have to be afraid of the security vulnerability. Google has not had to take any security measures here for the time being. The security vulnerability probably remained undiscovered by cyber criminals for the time being. So far, noth...
Read more

Face and voice recognition: Why TikTok wants to be allowed to collect biometric data in the USA

TikTok's privacy policy for the US now mentions the collection of biometric data from faces and voices. The background is likely to be a legal dispute that cost the company $92 million. Neue Datenschutzbestimmungen sind oft eher etwas für Juristen, doch die jüngste Aktualisierung von TikTok sollte alle Nutzerinnen und Nutzer in den USA aufhorchen lassen. Denn in den am 2. Juni aktualisierten Datenschutzbestimmungen für die USA ist ein Abschnitt enthalten, den es zuvor nicht gab. Er lautet übersetzt: »Wir sammeln möglicherweise biometrische Identifikationsmerkmale und biometrische Informationen, wie sie im US-Recht definiert sind, wie etwa von deinem Gesicht und deiner Stimme, aus deinen Inhalten.« Im englischsprachigen Original ist von »faceprint« und »voiceprint« die Rede. »Bevor wir damit anfangen«, frage man jedoch nach dem Einverständnis, wenn dies gesetzlich nötig sei, fügte noch TikTok hinzu. In response to an initial inquiry from "TechCrunch" about the ba...
Read more

Microsoft Teams, Zoom, WebEx: Berlin authority warns against popular video systems

After an initial data protection audit, some video service providers have made improvements to their offerings. But the Berlin data protection commissioner still sees serious shortcomings. The State Commissioner for Data Protection in Berlin (Germany), Maja Smoltczyk, advises against using leading video conferencing systems such as Microsoft Teams, Skype, Zoom, Google Meet, GoToMeeting, Teamviewer and Cisco WebEx. The reason is a retest of various offerings. After a number of services had already failed a test of data protection requirements last year, a new test of the major providers did not reveal any substantial improvement. Smoltczyk said that she was pleased "that our comments had persuaded so many providers to improve their offerings, in some cases very significantly, in terms of data protection". There are now enough legally compliant services for a wide range of purposes that there is no reason to break data protection law for video conferencing. However, if a provid...
Read more