The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) in the UK has fined facial recognition database company Clearview AI Inc more than £7.5m for using images of people that were scraped from websites and social media. Clearview AI collected the data to create a global online database, with one of the resulting applications being facial recognition. Clearview AI have also been ordered to delete personal data they hold on UK residents, and to stop obtaining and using the personal data that is publicly available on the internet. The ICO is the UK's independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the public interest. This action follows an investigation that they carried out in conjunction with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC).

Clearview AI is back in hot water, this time from the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). The controversial facial recognition giant has caught the attention of global privacy regulators and campaigners for its practice of scraping personal photos from the web for its system without explicit consent. Clearview AI is expected to have scraped over 10 billion photos. "Common law has never recognised a right to privacy for your face," Clearview AI lawyer Tor Ekeland once argued. The UK's ICO launched a joint probe with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) into Cleaview AI's practices. Earlier this month, Australia's Information Commissioner Angelene Falk determined that "the act of uploading an image to a social media site does not unambiguously indicate agreement to collection of that image by an unknown third party for commercial purposes."

The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has provisionally fined the facial recognition company Clearview AI £17 million ($22.6 million) for breaching UK data protection laws. It said that Clearview allegedly failed to inform citizens that it was collecting billions of their photos, among other transgressions. It has also (again, provisionally) ordered it to stop further processing of residents' personal data. The regulator said that Clearview apparently failed to process people's data "in a way that they likely expect or that is fair." It also alleged that the company failed to have a lawful reason to collect the data, didn't meet GDPR standards for biometric data, failed to have a process that prevents data from being retained indefinitely and failed to inform UK residents what was happening to their data.

Clearview AI, the controversial startup known for scraping billions of selfies from people's public social network profiles to train a facial-recognition system, may be fined just over £17m ($22.6m) by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). The watchdog on Monday publicly mulled punishing Clearview following an investigation launched last year with the Australian Information Commissioner. The ICO believes the US biz broke Britain's data-protection rules by, among other things, failing to have a "lawful reason" for collecting people's personal photos and info, and not being transparent about how the data was used and stored for its facial-recognition applications. Clearview harvests people's photos – 10 billion or more, it's thought – from their public social media profiles, and then builds a face-matching system so that if, say, the police upload a picture of someone from a CCTV still, the software can locate that person in its database and provide officers the corresponding name and online profiles. The images in Clearview AI Inc's database are likely to include the data of a substantial number of people from the UK and may have been gathered without people's knowledge from publicly available information online, including social media platforms.

A US company that gathered photos of people from Facebook and other social media sites for use in facial recognition by its clients is facing a £17m fine after the Information Commissioner's Office found it had committed "serious breaches" of data protection law. Clearview AI, which describes itself as the "world's largest facial network", allows its customers to compare facial data against a database of over 10bn images harvested from the internet. The database is "likely to include the data of a substantial number of people from the UK and may have been gathered without people's knowledge from publicly available information online, including social media platforms", the ICO said. Clearview's technology had been offered on a "free trial basis" to UK law enforcement agencies, the data regulator added. It said Clearview had broken data protection law by failing to process the information of people in the UK in a way they were likely to expect or that was fair.