A firm that allows its customers to search through a database of billions of photos retrieved from the web to find a corresponding face has succeeded in their appeal against the UK's data protection agency.
In 2020, the Information Commissioner's Office imposed a fine in excess of £7.5m on Clearview AI for keeping facial images without authorization.
Jack Mulcaire, the legal representative for Clearview AI expressed satisfaction with his client's situation.
The ICO indicated that it would assess the judgement.
Clearview AI provides its customers with a system that functions as a facial recognition search engine - they upload a picture and the service searches its vast compiled database of billions of pictures to find any matches.
It then furnishes links to locations on the internet where corresponding images can be found.
In March, Clearview's founder Hoan Ton-That informed the BBC that they had performed nearly one million searches for the purpose of assisting US law enforcement to resolve a variety of crimes, including homicides.
He also disclosed that the database held 30 billion images which had been taken from online sources.
Many critics assert that law enforcement's employment of Clearview's technology amounts to everyone becoming a perpetual suspect in a police line-up.
Prior to the unlawful action of the ICO, France, Italy, and Australia had already taken action against the firm.
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James Clayton, from the BBC, has experienced Clearview firsthand.
Previously, Clearview AI serviced commercial customers, but following a 2020 settlement from a case launched by American civil rights advocates, the organization now only permits customers who are involved in national security or criminal law enforcement activities.
Tuesday's judgement revealed that while Clearview does not have any clients in the UK or EU, its customers are located in the US and other nations such as Panama, Brazil, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.
Clearview successfully challenged the ICO's penalty and enforcement activities since it was only employed by law enforcement outside of the UK.
The three-member tribunal at the First-tier Tribunal found that although Clearview undertook data processing activities linked to tracking individuals' conduct in the UK, the ICO "wasn't permitted" to implement enforcement actions or hand out a punishment.
In response to the judgement, the watchdog declared that it would give serious consideration to future action but stressed: "It should be noted that this judgement does not prohibit the ICO from taking action against firms which operate internationally and process data concerning people in the UK, particularly those which extract data related to individuals in the UK, but specifically refers to a certain exemption involving foreign law enforcement."
Richmond-Coggan, a partner focusing on data protection at Freeths, said the appeal being allowed highlighted that the UK's data protection regulations could be applicable to scraping large amounts of data accessible to the public.
The decision was based solely on the fact that the customers of Clearview were foreign security and law enforcement agencies, and therefore it could not be assumed that they had given a blanket authorization for this type of data harvesting in general.
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