Security News > 2022 > May > Clearview AI face-matching service fined a lot less than expected
Face-matching service Clearview AI has only been around for five years, but it has courted plenty of controversy in that time, both inside and outside the courtroom.
Not long after the social media scraping brouhaha, Clearview AI suffered a widely-publicised data breach.
The ICO announced that it planned to fine Clearview AI more than £17m. What happened next?
The Information Commissioner's Office has fined Clearview AI Inc £7,552,800 for using images of people in the UK, and elsewhere, that were collected from the web and social media to create a global online database that could be used for facial recognition.
Clearview AI has now explicitly fallen foul of the law in the UK, and will no longer be allowed to scrape images of UK residents at all.
The problem, sadly, is that even if the vast majority of countries follow suit and order Clearview AI to stay away, those legalisms won't actively stop your photos getting scraped, in just the same way that laws criminalising the use of malware almost everywhere in the world haven't put an end to malware attacks.