France Has Ordered Clearview AI To Delete Its Facial Recognition Data:
Facial recognition company Clearview AI has been hit with another order by a country's watchdog agency to delete the personal data of its citizens, the latest in a global rebuke by privacy regulators around the world.
On Thursday, France's Commission Nationale Informatique et Libertés (CNIL) said Clearview had breached Europe's overarching data protection law, known as GDPR. It gave the company two months to delete the personal information it had collected and stop "unlawful processing" of the data.
The order comes after similar decisions from the UK and Australia in recent weeks. Clearview has built its business by scraping people's photos from the web and social media and indexing them in a vast facial recognition database.
The crackdown follows a series of BuzzFeed News investigations revealing widespread and sometimes unsanctioned use of the company's facial recognition software around the world. In August, BuzzFeed News reported that France's Ministry of the Interior is listed as having run more than 400 searches on Clearview, according to the facial recognition company's internal data. Despite the records, a spokesperson for the agency at the time said it had no information on Clearview.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 04 2022, @03:09AM (7 children)
Maybe we'll get lucky. Clearview defies the French, the French raid Clearview's offices, a bunch of Clearview people get shot, a lot of shit gets busted up, the authorities salvage enough evidence to convict all the survivors of the raid, and then the offices burn to the ground. Rinse and repeat in all the rest of the EU countries, plus the UK. I don't expect the US to follow the program though. Authoritarians love what Clearview is doing.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 04 2022, @05:46AM
Hoping your late night diaper parties under the bridge will get purged, know what I mean mate?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Tuesday January 04 2022, @10:36AM (1 child)
> I don't expect the US to follow the program though.
I believe US is negotiating a GDPR treaty in order to continue doing (IT) business with Europe. So maybe US will be bound by this sort of decision.
On the other hand, this sort of court order is doomed to fail when it is trivial to copy data around the place. Even 200 TB of data is not much, especially if it has significant value.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 04 2022, @02:16PM
>> So maybe US will be bound by this sort of decision.
LOL... the US can't be bound by any decision that the President doesn't like that week, whether or not they've signed a treaty.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 04 2022, @12:50PM
I don't think we'll get lucky. Multinational corporations cut across governments, and that's one way they insulate themselves from effective control within the vertical of a nation.
(m. u. l. t. i. n. a. t. i. o. n. a. l! last time I made this point, some gumby decided to whine, "but corporations are hierarchical!". No shit, Sherlock, but I'm also not talking about all corporations. I am explicitly talking about only multinationals.)
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 04 2022, @01:34PM
>>Clearview defies the French, the French raid Clearview's offices, a bunch of Clearview people get shot,
Easier way to accomplish this would be to let the Muslims know that Clearview's got pictures of Mohammed in its database.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday January 04 2022, @08:25PM (1 child)
You only say this because you want the US to have a monopoly on authoritarians and deny this wonderful privilege to other countries.
Some numbers... [papltd.co.uk]
So the US has more than five times the number of cameras (per 100 individuals) than France.
Now after Snowden's revelations in 2013, do you suppose that the US already does what Clerview does and probably much more worser.
Other fun numbers from that link:
Back when TMB was here (just to date it approximately) I posted once posted about (with source links including video) how Walmart banned a guy from all Walmarts for life for daring to open carry. (and I don't mean carrying children) Walmart got the guy's pictures as part of 'trespassing' him. (to verb a noun) Do you suppose Walmart wanted pictures for their security system cameras at all their locations? So they could automatically recognize such a dangerous individual upon setting foot in the entry way?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 05 2022, @01:48PM
A year before I'd actually started boycotting them after getting accosted to show id because a cousin was buying liquor. The following year I ended up at one of the older Walmarts in an area that had trended African-American, and holy shit. The slightly more subtle LP cameras of the bigger/new/whiter stores was out. They had cameras on endcaps staring *DOWN* the aisles and multiple PTZ cameras hanging off the shelves. The whole place felt like a dystopian nightmare (I was thankfully only in there with someone else who had decided they needed to buy electronics, unfortunately after the first Fry's in the region had closed.
This is also one of the reasons I've been rather peeved with the conservatives gleefully flaunting mask laws and getting in people's faces (and yes I've seen that happen in my area, although thankfully not to me.) This is literally the one and only time we will have the benefit of wearing masks in public. Combined with sunglasses and over the ear headwear, we can eliminate positive facial recognition 98 percent of the time during our travels, barring cell phones, or tracking by clothing+license plate recognition. And yet somehow that key benefit to this pandemic is ignored because the politics of it are taking away my right to be facially recorded in public! Who do these people think they are, the Kardashians? Or maybe little honey boo boo?