ACLU files suit against facial recognition firm
The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday sued facial recognition startup Clearview AI, which has 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 bottom line is that, if left unchecked, Clearview’s product is going to end privacy as we know it,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, a lawyer at the ACLU.
The suit 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 ... entirely unbeknownst to those people, and offer paid access to that database to private and governmental actors worldwide.”
“It’s unfortunate that the ACLU seeks to censor a search engine that people can use to access information on the internet,” said Tor Ekeland, a lawyer for Clearview. “It’s unfortunate that they think the First Amendment allows this.”
The ACLU said the lawsuit would compel a facial recognition company to answer to groups representing sexual assault survivors and other communities uniquely harmed by surveillance.