Last week, the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) slapped a £7.5m fine on a smallish tech company called Clearview AI for "using images of people in the UK, and elsewhere, that were collected from the web and social media to create a global online database that could be used for facial recognition". The ICO also issued an enforcement notice, ordering the company to stop obtaining and using the personal data of UK residents that is publicly available on the internet and to delete the data of UK residents from its systems. Since Clearview AI is not exactly a household name some background might be helpful. It's a US outfit that has "scraped" (ie digitally collected) more than 20bn images of people's faces from publicly available information on the internet and social media platforms all over the world to create an online database. The company uses this database to provide a service that allows customers to upload an image of a person to its app, which is then checked for a match against all the images in the database.

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).

The UK's data protection watchdog has confirmed a penalty for the controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI -- announcing a fine of just over £7.5 million today for a string of breaches of local privacy laws. The watchdog has also issued an enforcement notice, ordering Clearview to stop obtaining and using the personal data of UK residents that is publicly available on the internet; and telling it to delete the information of UK residents from its systems. The US company has amassed a database of 20 billion facial images by scraping data off the public internet, such as from social media services, to create an online database that it uses to power an AI-based identity-matching service which it sells to entities such as law enforcement. The problem is Clearview has never asked individuals whether it can use their selfies for that. And in many countries it has been found in breach of privacy laws.

The UK's data watchdog has fined a facial recognition company £7.5m for collecting images of people from social media platforms and the web to add to a global database. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) also ordered US-based Clearview AI to delete the data of UK residents from its systems. Clearview AI has collected more than 20bn images of people's faces from Facebook, other social media companies and from scouring the web. John Edwards, the UK information commissioner, said Clearview's business model was unacceptable. "Clearview AI Inc has collected multiple images of people all over the world, including in the UK, from a variety of websites and social media platforms, creating a database with more than 20bn images," he said. "The company not only enables identification of those people, but effectively monitors their behaviour and offers it as a commercial service.

Clearview AI has been fined £7.55 million ($9.5 million) by the UK's privacy watchdog for illegally scraping the facial images of UK residents from social media and the web. It was also ordered to stop obtaining the data of UK residents and to delete any it has already collected. "The company not only enables identification of those people, but effectively monitors their behavior and offers it as a commercial service. That is unacceptable," said UK information commissioner John Edwards in a statement. The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) opened a joint investigation with Australia into Clearview AI back in 2020, and issued a preliminary fine of £17 million ($21.4 million) against the company late last year.