The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has handed a large fine to the facial recognition company Clearview AI for using images of UK people scraped from the web and social media to create a gigantic search engine for faces.
The ICO fined the facial recognition company £7.5 million ($9.4 million), calling its methods to grow its global online database “unacceptable.”
The watchdog wrote in a statement on Monday that the company had breached UK data protection laws.
The ICO wrote that Clearview AI collected more than 20 billion images of people’s faces and data from publicly available information on the Internet and social media platforms all over the world to create an online database. It added that people were not informed that their images were being collected or used in this way….