By Alfred Ng, POLITICO
A California consumer advocacy group wants the state’s attorney general and privacy enforcement agency to look into the conduct of Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition firm known for scraping billions of images from the internet.
Consumer Watchdog sent the letter to Attorney General Rob Bonta and the California Privacy Protection Agency’s Ashkan Soltani on Nov. 28 alleging that Clearview AI is violating the state’s data privacy regulations by failing to provide meaningful methods to opt out of the company’s data collection. The advocacy organization also claims Clearview AI is collecting children’s data without consent.
The letter, made public today, cites Clearview AI’s marketing material and public remarks as evidence it collects data on both children and people who have opted out.
Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That denied the allegations in a statement to POLITICO.
“Clearview AI’s technology is fully lawful and compliant with the CCPA,” he said. “Images of Californians who have exercised their right to opt-out of our data processing are blocked from any subsequent collection.”
Ton-That’s response echoes Clearview AI’s privacy policies, noting the company blocks images of opted-out Californians from future data collection, and that the company doesn’t knowingly collect data of children.
“We are proud of our technology’s revolutionary impact in the fight against online sexual exploitation of children,” Ton-That said. “It is important to note that Clearview AI does not possess any information regarding the age of any people who appear in any public online photo that we have collected.”
Consumer Watchdog uses Clearview AI’s work on finding missing children — one of the more favorable uses of facial recognition among lawmakers — as evidence that the company knows it collects data on kids.
The CPPA and California attorney general’s office declined to comment.
— California’s role: Governments in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Greece and Italy have all brought enforcement actions against Clearview AI for various privacy violations tied to scraping images from the internet without people’s consent.
Without a federal data privacy law in the U.S., the most significant enforcement against Clearview AI came from a lawsuit settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union in 2022, where the company agreed to stop selling its technology to most commercial businesses in the U.S.
That settlement came as a result of Illinois’ biometric data privacy law, and Consumer Watchdog staff attorney Ryan Mellino believes California’s privacy enforcement has stronger potential to rein in Clearview AI.
“It has a different weight when it’s coming from a government regulator like the California Privacy Protection Agency,” Mellino said. “Having a government agency … say Clearview AI can’t do that, it’s going to have a big impact on how Clearview AI can operate in the rest of the country.”
