The Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens is launching an investigation into Clearview AI. The American technology company collects photos of people on the Internet on a large scale and stores them in a database. This is done without explicit consent and may be unlawful.
The regulator confirms this to RTL News ( 1)
Clearview AI is a company that provides facial recognition technology to investigative agencies worldwide. To do so, the company has created a database consisting of billions of profile photos and other imagery. According to the latest figures, Clearview has collected more than 30 billion photos for this purpose. The company aims to expand its face database to over one hundred billion photos.
To collect all this footage, Clearview uses what is known as scraping software. That's a program that automatically scours the Internet for usable photos and adds them to the database. The photos come from social media and other public sources, such as personal Web sites and blogs.
Clearview's facial recognition technology and practices are controversial. That's because the technology company scrapes together photos without explicitly asking users for permission to do so. For that reason, the company has received multiple multi-million dollar fines from European privacy regulators.
Greek, British, Italian and French data protection authorities handed out fines of up to 20 million euros. Regulators from Belgium, Sweden, Germany, Canada and Australia ordered Clearview to stop collecting photos of citizens and delete photos in its database.
The company also processes faces of Dutch citizens. Therefore, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens is launching an investigation into the company. "It seems that Clearview processes too many and unlawfully faces. That's why the company has our attention. It is a serious issue," AP board chairman Aleid Wolfsen told RTL Nieuws. He says it may be months before the regulator shares more details about the investigation.
In a comment, Hoan Ton-That, director of Clearview AI, let it be known that his company is not subject to European privacy laws. "Clearview has no office in the Netherlands or the EU, has no customers in the Netherlands or the EU and undertakes no activities that would otherwise make it fall under the AVG [General Data Protection Regulation, ed.]," Ton-That told RTL News.
Lotte Houwing of Bits of Freedom says it is good that the Dutch regulator is putting the company under the magnifying glass. "It's very nice that the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens is finally going to do something. Foreign regulators demanded that Clearview remove faces of citizens from that country from their database. We want that too."
The American medium Buzzfeed News reported in August 2021 that the Dutch police have used Clearview AI's services between 51 and 100 times in the past. The House of Representatives questioned then-Minister for Legal Protection Sander Dekker about this several times. The minister maintained that although the police use facial recognition technology, they do not purchase services from Clearview for this purpose.
"The use of Clearview is not compatible with legal provisions and violates our fundamental rights. The collection and processing of personal data for the benefit of criminal proceedings must be aimed at a concrete purpose, must be based on the law, and must comply with the principles of proportionality and subsidiarity. And this must be subject to supervision," former Minister Dekker said at the time.
https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/nederland/artikel/5389344/onderzoek-autoriteit-persoonsgegevens-clearview-gezichtendatabase
