ClearView refuses to leave France, and receives a registration penalty
ClearView did not take into account the CNIL’s decision to impose heavy fines in France last October. Not only did the American company refuse to pay, but it consistently failed to comply with the ban issued by the French policeman. Feed your facial recognition tool With French photos collected from online sites.
This is what the CNIL thinks, in a statement published on the organization’s official website this Wednesday, May 10.The company has not sent any evidence of compliance within this period“. Faced with this observation, the French police has announced a new ban against ClearView. In addition A 20 million euro fine was imposed in OctoberAfter a period of two months the company must exempt itself from paying a fine of 100,000 euros per day. 5 million euros.
Why did ClearView die?
This is the first fine imposed on ClearView by the concerned CNIL Illegal mining of public data. The company, founded in 2017, made a habit of “sucking photos from many websites, including social networks,” and then marketing its database as a search engine dedicated to facial recognition in the US territory. The database, which is accessible to private companies and law enforcement alike, draws inspiration from French platforms.
At the time, the CNIL reprimanded the company, ordering it to delete data collected in France and not to extract photos from the French site. She was given two months to come into ClearView compliance. Something the American giant couldn’t do. due to A penalty of €100,000 per day lateThe company must now receive an additional fine of 5.2 million euros.
ClearView doesn’t want to pay
It must be said that under French law the deletion of photographs is a non-precedential act. “There is no way to determine whether a person is a French citizen based solely on a public photo on the Internet, so data cannot be removed from French residents.“, insulted ClearView’s boss in an official press release to AFP.
For ClearView, the company does not have to comply with the GDPR because it has no business identity or customers in France and the EU. However, the start-up has already suffered Similar penalties in 2022 In England and Italy.
