An AI Company Scraped Billions of Photos For Facial Recognition. Regulators Can’t Stop It

An AI Company Scraped Billions of Photos For Facial Recognition. Regulators Can’t Stop It

More and more privacy watchdogs around the world are standing up to Clearview AI, a U.S. company that has collected billions of photos from the internet without people’s permission.



The company, which uses those photos for its facial recognition software, was fined £7.5 million ($9.4 million) by a U.K. regulator on May 26. The U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said the firm, Clearview AI, had broken data protection law. The company denies breaking the law.











But the case reveals how nations have struggled to regulate artificial intelligence across borders.



Facial recognition tools require huge quantities of data. In the race to build profitable new AI tools that can be sold to state agencies or attract new investors, companies have turned to downloading—or “scraping”—trillions of data points from the open web.



In the case of Clearview, these are pictures of peoples’ faces from all over the internet, including social media, news sites and anywhere else a face might appear. The company has reportedly collected 20 billion photographs—the equivalent of nearly three per human on the planet.



Those photos underpin the company’s facial recognition algorithm. They are used as training data, or a