Clearview was fined $9.5 million for collecting personal data.

The American firm Clearview AI, specializing in the recognition of human images, was fined in the UK. The British regulator (Information Commissioner's Office, ICO), whose activities are dedicated to ensuring the openness of government authorities and protecting confidential information of citizens of the country, issued a fine to the company in the amount of £7.5 million (more than 0.55 billion rubles).

According to the ICO, the company was in violation of several UK laws related to the protection of personal data. Their collection is allowed only if there is a "legitimate reason". The American firm did not have this. How there was no "honesty and transparency" in the use of the data obtained.

Clearview owns an Internet service that allows you to search for images of people by a photo uploaded to a database. At the same time, the application not only finds similar photos, but also provides links to websites where similar images were posted.

The volume of the database of images at the disposal of Clearview is estimated at 20 billion human faces. All of them, as a rule, were taken from social networks and public sources, where users upload them voluntarily. At the same time, the American company began processing the photos without trying to notify or obtain consent from the persons depicted on them.

The British ICO department began investigating Clearview's activities in 2020.

Then the British, in the process of working together with Australian specialists, managed to establish that there is information about a significant number of British citizens in the database of the American company. The firm was fined $21.4 million.

Later it turned out that the company not only identifies residents of the United Kingdom by their virtual images, but also offers paid services to track their daily lives. This caused outrage from Information Commissioner John Edwards.

Now experts are wondering whether Clearview will pay a fine in the UK, where it does not officially operate. After all, the American organization had previously ignored similar sanctions imposed by the Italian regulator. As the head of the company, Hoan Ton-Tat, noted, the company's work is not subject to the action of EU law.

It is known that Clearview services are actively used by representatives of special services from different countries.

During the military special operation of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, information appeared that it was the biometric algorithms of the service that allow identifying the identity of the dead, wounded or prisoners, regardless of which country they are citizens of. The main thing is that on the Internet a person or someone from his close circle left a digital footprint in the form of a snapshot, and then the photo became part of Big Data, with which the company works.