French Government Hits Clearview with the Maximum Fine for GDPR Violations
upstart writes:
French Government Hits Clearview With The Maximum Fine For GDPR Violations:
Clearview hasn't won many friends since its inception. Scraping the web of any relevant content to compile a few billion records for facial recognition matches is no way to run a respectable business, and Clearview has been anything but respectable.
[...] Clearview's run in the US has been slightly more successful that its endeavors outside our borders. Thanks to a lack of strong privacy laws, not much can be done about Clearview's scrape-and-sell tactics. But outside of the US, Clearview is finding it almost impossible to engage in shady business as usual.
A few countries have explicitly uninvited Clearview. The UK, after first threatening a $23 million fine for privacy law violations, finally settled on a $9.4 million fine that came with an order to delete all data pertaining to UK residents. The Italian government had the same problems with Clearview and its web scraping, ordering it to pay a $21 million fine for GDPR violations.
The same conclusion has been reached in France, adding to Clearview's European tab. As Natasha Lomas reports for TechCrunch, French regulators have hit Clearview with the maximum possible fine for GDPR violations.
"Clearview AI had two months to comply with the injunctions formulated in the formal notice and to justify them to the CNIL. However, it did not provide any response to this formal notice," the CNIL wrote in a press release today announcing the sanction [emphasis its].
"The chair of the CNIL therefore decided to refer the matter to the restricted committee, which is in charge for issuing sanctions. On the basis of the information brought to its attention, the restricted committee decided to impose a maximum financial penalty of 20 million euros, according to article 83 of the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation]."
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