The walls are closing in on Clearview AI

The ICO found that Clearview AI had been in breach of data protection laws, collected personal data without people's consent, and asked for additional information, such as photos, when people asked if they were in the database. It found that this may have "acted as a disincentive" for people who objected to their data being scraped. "The company not only enables identification of those people, but effectively monitors their behaviour and offers it as a commercial service. That is unacceptable," said John Edwards, the UK's information commissioner, in a statement. Clearview AI boasts one of the world's largest databases of people's faces, with 20 billion images that it has scraped off the internet from publicly available sources, such as social media, without their consent.