After the fine of 20 million euros imposed by the Privacy Guarantor comes the fine of 7.5 million pounds – equal to about 9 million euros – from Great Britain. Clearview AI, an American company specializing in facial recognition that acquires data on the web, has been accused by the British authorities of illegally collecting facial images of people residing in the United Kingdom. This activity, according to the Information Commissioner’s Office (Ico), must cease as of the deletion of the data of British citizens.
Who is Cleirview.
Clearview AI, founded in New York in 2017, has received fierce criticism for data privacy breaches around the world for several months. As early as 2020, the company leapt to the news after the New York Times investigation that law enforcement in the United States – from the local police in Florida to the FBI to the Department of Homeland Security – had made use of its “app ”Based on artificial intelligence for facial recognition. To train his facial recognition algorithms, he collected an archive of faces taking them directly from social networks automatically through scraping techniques. According to The Washington Post which came into possession of an investor presentation dating back to December last year, their database is over 100 billion photos. In practice, they would have at least 14 shots for each inhabitant of the planet.
Because this data is different from the others
“The mismanagement by Clearview AI of facial recognition data – commented Toby Lewis, Global Head of Threat Analysis at Darktrace – represents not only a problem of privacy, but also of IT security, especially if the non-observance of the laws in The company’s privacy scope also extends to its cybersecurity strategy. Even when the data collected is obtained legally, its security is as important as the regulation of the application of technologies such as, for example, facial recognition. Data concerning this technology represents a relatively new type of personally identifiable information (PII) and has a particularly high market value on the darkweb, making it a very attractive target for cybercriminals aiming to threaten organizations by asking for a ransom: the more sensitive the data, the more likely the organization is to pay ».