Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition technology company, was ordered by the country's privacy watchdog, the office of the information commissioner (ICO), to delete all data belonging to UK residents. ICO also fined Clearview £ 7.5 million ($9.4 million) for failing to comply with UK data protection laws. This is the fourth country in Clearview to be ordered to delete data in this way, after Australia, France and Italy issued similar orders and fines.
Clearview AI claims that its facial recognition database contains about 20 billion images crawled from public sources such as Facebook and instagram, and previously sold its software to a range of private users and businesses, but recently agreed to restrict sales to federal agencies and police departments in the United States after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit.
In the UK, Clearview AI's services have been used by law enforcement clients in the past, including the London police, the Department of defense and the national crime prevention agency. ICO said the company "no longer provides services to UK organizations", but noted that the data it crawls from UK residents can still be used by customers in other countries.
In a press statement, British Information Commissioner John Edwards said Clearview was likely to collect a large amount of information about British residents. "The company can not only identify these people, but also effectively monitor their behavior and provide it as a business service. This is unacceptable," Edwards said. "That's why we took action to protect the British people by imposing fines on the company and issuing enforcement notices."
ICO said Clearview violated several principles of UK data protection law, including the failure to use data in a "fair and transparent" manner (given that residents' images were crawled away without their knowledge or consent), "there is no legal reason to collect people's information", and "there is no procedure to prevent data from being retained indefinitely".
However, although ICO has issued a ticket to Clearview and ordered the company to delete data in the UK, it is unclear how Clearview will execute this order if there is no business or customer sanctions in the UK. In response to similar deletion orders and fines issued by Italy under EU law earlier this year, the CEO of Clearview, Hoan ton that, responded that the US based company was not bound by EU law at all.