Italy slaps facial recognition firm Clearview AI with €20 million fine:
Italy's data privacy watchdog said it will fine the controversial facial recognition firm Clearview AI for breaching EU law. An investigation by Garante, Italy's data protection authority, found that the company's database of 10 billion images of faces includes those of Italians and residents in Italy. The New York City-based firm is being fined €20 million, and will also have to delete any facial biometrics it holds of Italian nationals.
This isn't the first time that the beleaguered facial recognition tech company is facing legal consequences. The UK data protection authority last November fined the company £17 million after finding its practices—which include collecting selfies of people without their consent from security camera footage or mugshots—violate the nation's data protection laws. The company has also been banned in Sweden, France and Australia.
[...] Despite losing troves of facial recognition data from entire countries, Clearview AI has a plan to rapidly expand this year. The company told investors that it is on track to have 100 billion photos of faces in its database within a year, reported The Washington Post. In its pitch deck, the company said it hopes to secure an additional $50 million from investors to build even more facial recognition tools and ramp up its lobbying efforts.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 11 2022, @11:00PM
How many of those photos have been harvested from places like Facebook? I got hung up on that word 'selfies' for a moment, then realized that people do indeed upload 'selfies' onto the web. Using the word seems an admission that they are harvesting anything they can get from the web.