ACLU accuses tech firm of privacy ‘nightmare’

The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday sued facial recognition startup Clearview AI, which claims to have helped hundreds of law enforcement agencies use online photos to solve crimes, accusing the company of “unlawful privacy-destroying surveillance activities.”

In a suit filed in Illinois, the ACLU said that Clearview violated a state law that forbids companies from using a resident’s fingerprints or face scans without consent. Under the law, residents have the right to sue companies for up to $5,000 per privacy violation.

The suit, filed in the Circuit Court of Cook County, adds to the growing backlash against Clearview since January, when the New York Times reported that the company had amassed a database of more than 3 billion photos across the internet, including from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Venmo. This trove of photos enables anyone with the Clearview app to match a person to their online photos and find links back to the sites where the images originated.

People in New York and Vermont have also filed suits against the company in recent months, and the state attorneys general of Vermont and New Jersey have ordered Clearview to stop collecting residents’ photos.

According to the ACLU suit, “Clearview has set out to do what many companies have intentionally avoided out of ethical concerns: create a mass database of billions of face prints of people, including millions of Illinoisans, entirely unbeknownst to those people, and offer paid access to that database to private and governmental actors worldwide.”

The company’s business model, the complaint said, “appears to embody the nightmare scenario” of a “private company capturing untold quantities of biometric data for purposes of surveillance and tracking without notice to the individuals affected, much less their consent.”

“Clearview AI is a search engine that uses only publicly available images accessible on the internet,” said Tor Ekeland, a lawyer for Clearview. “It is absurd that the ACLU wants to censor which search engines people can use to access public information on the internet. The First Amendment forbids this.”

The Illinois suit was prepared by the ACLU, the ACLU of Illinois and law firm Edelson PC, which has specialized in class-action suits against technology companies for privacy violations. Other organizations that have signed on to the legal action include the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, the Sex Workers Outreach Project and the Illinois State Public Interest Research Group.