The American artificial intelligence (AI) facial recognition company Clearview has been fined 20 million euros for having launched “authentic biometric surveillance of people on Italian territory” using your data “illegally”, the country’s Data Protection Authority reported on Wednesday.
An investigation by the agency has revealed that the company, with a database of more than 10 billion images of people’s faces from around the world“allows, contrary to what it claims, the tracking of Italian citizens and people located in Italy,” it reveals in a statement.
Clearview AI offers a highly qualified search service that, thanks to AI systems, allows you to create profiles based on biometric data extracted from public websitespossibly enriched with other related information, such as the title and geolocation of the photo, the publication web page explains.
“The results (of the investigation) revealed that the personal data held by the company, including biometric and geolocation data, is processed illegally, without a proper legal basis.”
In addition, the company has also violated “the obligations of transparency, by not having adequately informed users; limitation of purpose, by having used user data for purposes other than those published online, and limitation of conservation, as no data conservation periods have been established”.
For all this, “Clearview AI’s activities violated the freedoms of data subjects, including the protection of privacy and the right not to be discriminated against”, which has led the guarantor to impose an administrative fine of 20 million euros, in addition to ordering “the deletion of the data of people in Italy and prohibiting it from continuing to collect and process that data through its facial recognition system ”.
Last October, the European Parliament called for a ban on predictive policing based on behavioral data obtained from artificial intelligence (AI) systems and facial recognition from private databases, specifically mentioning Clearview.
MEPs warned that AI-based identification systems misidentify minority ethnic groups, LGBTI people, older people and women in greater proportionwhich is “especially worrying” when the law has to be applied or in border control.
For this reason, they demanded that the surveillance of the behavior of citizens, the use of AI for border control and the automated recognition of people in public spaces be prohibited. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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