French Government Hits Clearview With The Maximum Fine For GDPR Violations:
Clearview hasn't won many friends since its inception. Scraping the web of any relevant content to compile a few billion records for facial recognition matches is no way to run a respectable business, and Clearview has been anything but respectable.
[...] Clearview's run in the US has been slightly more successful that its endeavors outside our borders. Thanks to a lack of strong privacy laws, not much can be done about Clearview's scrape-and-sell tactics. But outside of the US, Clearview is finding it almost impossible to engage in shady business as usual.
A few countries have explicitly uninvited Clearview. The UK, after first threatening a $23 million fine for privacy law violations, finally settled on a $9.4 million fine that came with an order to delete all data pertaining to UK residents. The Italian government had the same problems with Clearview and its web scraping, ordering it to pay a $21 million fine for GDPR violations.
The same conclusion has been reached in France, adding to Clearview's European tab. As Natasha Lomas reports for TechCrunch, French regulators have hit Clearview with the maximum possible fine for GDPR violations.
"Clearview AI had two months to comply with the injunctions formulated in the formal notice and to justify them to the CNIL. However, it did not provide any response to this formal notice," the CNIL wrote in a press release today announcing the sanction [emphasis its].
"The chair of the CNIL therefore decided to refer the matter to the restricted committee, which is in charge for issuing sanctions. On the basis of the information brought to its attention, the restricted committee decided to impose a maximum financial penalty of 20 million euros, according to article 83 of the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation]."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snospar on Wednesday October 26 2022, @06:06PM
Have any of these fines actually been paid? Or can we assume that this company is going to suddenly collapse into administration without paying anything? Only to pop-up a few months later as "Secretview" - a completely honest business with no relation to that other one.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2022, @07:48PM (2 children)
Government IT worker here, here's what's going to happen with these fines:
Government Entity A is going to say "hey Business A, you're bad, pay a fine!"
Government Entity B is going to say "hey Business A, our citizens are bad, we need your services to spy on them"
Business A is going to say "no problem Entity B, but our prices have gone up to pay the fines you imposed on us as Government Entity A"
I'm not a Clearview customer, but we both use and punish other similar services regularly.
(Score: 3, Touché) by RamiK on Wednesday October 26 2022, @08:19PM
I wouldn't be surprised if the French government is a Clearview customer and the fine will simply be covered by an additional charge. Hell, they'll probably make it tax deductible and turn in a profit too.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday October 27 2022, @03:35PM
We? Well, hello, comrade Putin! Or is it Trump? The two are nearly identical. Neither one gives a rat's ass about rights.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Wednesday October 26 2022, @08:19PM
Until someone in the decision making process suffers it will be business as usual. Ban them from the industry for x years, fine them personally $xx, or toss them in jail for a while.
Until one of those 3 things happen this shit will continue unabated.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2022, @02:32AM
I don't think there's any link but Raytheon also has (had?) a Clear View [mediaroom.com] package--more of an insider threat surveillance and DLP package AFAIK. By sheer coincidence, it was also shady as hell in a lot of ways. I know because I had a chance to work on it and walked away in part because it had the smell of mass Unconstitutional surveillance about it.