Nowadays, the concept of digital privacy is a distant memory, as companies swipe more and more of our data. Not many people know that photos of them are on a massive online database owned by a company called Clearview AI. Well, Clearview AI was fined €35 million for illegally storing the facial data of Dutch citizens.
In case you don’t know, Clearview AI is an American company that maintains a massive pool of images of people’s faces. It boasts a whopping 50 billion images, so you know that it contains images of people from around the world. It sells this facial data to intelligence and investigative agencies. Governmental agencies and law enforcement entities benefit from this company’s data.
Clearview AI was fined $35 million for illegally storing Dutch citizens’ data
Even though Clearview AI is an American company, it’s still bound by the rules of other countries. The Dutch Data Protection Agency (DPA) was not happy about the company storing data from its people without their consent. Aleid Wolfsen, the chairman of the Dutch DPA said that this technology is “highly intrusive.” Which is spot on. The thing is that billions of people’s photos are being stored, and they have no idea. “If there is a photo of you on the Internet – and doesn’t that apply to all of us? – then you can end up in the database of Clearview AI and be tracked. This is not a doom scenario from a scary film,” Wolfsen said.
As such, Clearview AI was fined a hefty €33.7 million ($30.5 million) for storing the data. That’s not all, as another €5 million ($5.5 million) was tacked on for non-compliance.
This isn’t the company’s first run-in with hefty fines, as it faced similar fines from the UK. As such, the company is not allowed to store data from UK citizens. This is the same for other countries like Australia, Canada, Italy, and France. We’re sure that other companies will follow.
2024-09-03 15:04:48