An AI firm harvested billions of photos without consent. Britain is powerless to act
An AI firm harvested billions of photos without consent. Britain is powerless to act
Maybe they shouldn't have left the EU.
How would that affect a US company? Did you read the article or just kneejerk a brexit snark for internet points?
The ICO failed “not because this isn't monitoring and not because in other circumstances, this might not be in breach of U.K. GDPR, but because it's foreign law enforcement. It's outside of the scope of European Union law so it doesn't apply,” said James Moss, privacy and data protection partner at the law firm Bird & Bird.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
LONDON — Britain’s top privacy regulator has no power to sanction an American-based AI firm which harvested vast numbers of personal photos for its facial recognition software without users' consent, a judge has ruled.
The New York Times reported in 2020 that Clearview AI had harvested billions of social media images without users’ consent.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) took action against Clearview last year, alleging it had unlawfully collected the data of British subjects for behavior-monitoring purposes.
Lawyers have pointed out that the company was under no obligation to purge Brits’ pictures from its database until the appeal was determined — and yesterday’s ruling applied not only to the fine, but the deletion order too.
The identity-matching technology, trained on photos scraped without permission from social media platforms and other internet sites, was initially made available to a range of business users as well as law enforcement bodies.
Following a 2020 lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, the company now only offers its services to federal agencies and law enforcement in the U.S. Yesterday’s judgment revealed it also has clients in Panama, Brazil, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.
The original article contains 627 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
What? Someone downloaded photos that people willingly uploaded to a public network? You don’t say.
Except it's not because these are photos people are choosing to post.
I am a privacy advocate but I will have to disagree with you. There is no such thing as privacy on public places , or in the public internet. If you upload a picture to the internet publicly then it is publicly available to everyone.
I'm not saying they're in the right, but once you put stuff on the internet it's near impossible to stop people doing what they want with it
That's only true for people who don't care about operating lawfully. A big company cannot practically afford to do the same things as some random fly under the radar niche community.
That being said, this is a US company, so that may be a problem.
Exactly. My first thought when I read the headline? “Who cares.” How many human eyes have harvested the same images without consent. At least AI isn’t going to stalk you afterwards.
… You do realize that AI is a tool which can make stalking monstrously easy?