Lemmy Today

"A company which enables its clients to search a database of billions of images scraped from the internet for matches to a particular face has won an appeal against the UK's privacy watchdog.

Last year, Clearview AI was fined more than £7.5m by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for unlawfully storing facial images.

Privacy International (who helped bring the original case I believe) responded to this on Mastodon:

"The first 33 pages of the judgment explain with great detail and clarity why Clearview falls squarely within the bounds of GDPR. Clearview's activities are entirely "related to the monitoring of behaviour" of UK data subjects.

In essence, what Clearview does is large-scale processing of a highly intrusive nature. That, the Tribunal agreed.

BUT in the last 2 pages the Tribunal tells us that because Clearview only sells to foreign governments, it doesn't fall under UK GDPR jurisdiction.

So Clearview would have been subject to GDPR if it sold its services to UK police or government authorities or commercial entities, but because it doesn't, it can do whatever the hell it wants with UK people's data - this is at best puzzling, at worst nonsensical."

Clearview AI offers its clients a system that works like a search engine for faces - users upload a photo and it finds matches in a database of billions of images it has collected.It then provides links to where matching images appear online.

In March, Clearview's founder Hoan Ton-That said it had run nearly a million searches for US police, helping them to solve a range of crimes, including murders.

He also revealed its database contained 30 billion images scraped from the internet.

Critics argue that law enforcement's use of Clearview's technology puts everyone into a "perpetual police line-up".

France, Italy and Australia had also taken action against the firm.