The UK has fined them has fined Clearview AI £7,552,800 in 2022 but they have not paid.
EU data protection authorities did not come up with a way to enforce its fines and bans against the US company, allowing Clearview AI to effectively dodge the law.
> EU data protection authorities did not come up with a way to enforce its fines and bans against the US company, allowing Clearview AI to effectively dodge the law.
This is laughable. You make it illegal for any EU company to do business with them, you imprison leadership as they arrive on EU soil, there's a hundred things you can do. Companies like these that simply ignore the law and seriously damage society need to be treated just like international drug trafficking rings. Never heard a "well they keep ignoring our fines and bans, oh my what do we do" when talking about those.
gampleman•1h ago
> imprison leadership as they arrive on EU soil
I think that's the step that's being taken (or attempted at least) here.
cynicalsecurity•1h ago
> you imprison leadership as they arrive on EU soil
It's in the article, Austria might issue a criminal warrant for the company executives.
anonym29•57m ago
I'm no fan of surveillance technology in general, nor of Clearview specifically, but no American corporation is legally obligated to obey British law. To suggest that Clearview is "dodging" the (British) law falsely implies that Clearview has any legal duty to obey (British) law in the first place.
Sure, if they don't want to follow British law, Britain has the right to reject Clearview from British markets, but that's about it. The British government does not have jurisdiction over American companies or American citizens outside of Britain's borders, in spite of what British Parliament seems to believe.
ForHackernews•36m ago
If they do business in the EU they are obligated to follow EU laws, and if they have committed crimes they should be subject to arrest and extradition.
I know you're making a point about Ofcom censorship, and I agree, but we cannot set the precedent that "if you commit your crimes using a company in Delaware, they're not illegal." If you program your AI-drone to murder your enemies, that's fine as long as the control server is offshore?
anonym29•15m ago
Should European citizens be subject to the laws of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and pals?
Either laws in other countries matter in yours (regardless of how different they are from your own) or they don't.
Picking and choosing which country's laws you do or don't want to consider yourself bound to on moral grounds is not fundamentally very different from picking which of your own country's laws you do or don't want to consider yourself bound to on moral grounds.
A_D_E_P_T•25m ago
> I'm no fan of surveillance technology in general, nor of Clearview specifically, but no American corporation is legally obligated to obey British law.
All the more when what Clearview has done is build an index of publicly available images, and associated URLs, derived from the freely-crawlable open web. Legal rulings in the US -- e.g., in Sorrell v. IMS Health -- consistently show that information aggregation and dissemination are treated as speech, so creating and distributing the Clearview index is protected expression under the First Amendment.
Also, Clearview is far from the only game in town. Lots of tech companies -- including some very large ones -- have facial recognition indexes. I suspect that Clearview is being made an example of, pour encourager les autres. But it seems a little bit exceptional, as though the law isn't being fairly or evenly applied.
impossiblefork•3m ago
I think the issue is that people are using personal information to train AI systems.
This is threat personal data integrity and it doesn't really matter how the images were obtained. The threat to people exists despite the fact that they were on the public internet.
pogue•1h ago
I wish the US took data protections like this as seriously as the EU. Our data is just passed around like a gangbang on a daily basis and the US is just like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
reify•2h ago
The UK has fined them has fined Clearview AI £7,552,800 in 2022 but they have not paid.
EU data protection authorities did not come up with a way to enforce its fines and bans against the US company, allowing Clearview AI to effectively dodge the law.
https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...
A shit company
deaux•2h ago
This is laughable. You make it illegal for any EU company to do business with them, you imprison leadership as they arrive on EU soil, there's a hundred things you can do. Companies like these that simply ignore the law and seriously damage society need to be treated just like international drug trafficking rings. Never heard a "well they keep ignoring our fines and bans, oh my what do we do" when talking about those.
gampleman•1h ago
I think that's the step that's being taken (or attempted at least) here.
cynicalsecurity•1h ago
It's in the article, Austria might issue a criminal warrant for the company executives.
anonym29•57m ago
Sure, if they don't want to follow British law, Britain has the right to reject Clearview from British markets, but that's about it. The British government does not have jurisdiction over American companies or American citizens outside of Britain's borders, in spite of what British Parliament seems to believe.
ForHackernews•36m ago
I know you're making a point about Ofcom censorship, and I agree, but we cannot set the precedent that "if you commit your crimes using a company in Delaware, they're not illegal." If you program your AI-drone to murder your enemies, that's fine as long as the control server is offshore?
anonym29•15m ago
Either laws in other countries matter in yours (regardless of how different they are from your own) or they don't.
Picking and choosing which country's laws you do or don't want to consider yourself bound to on moral grounds is not fundamentally very different from picking which of your own country's laws you do or don't want to consider yourself bound to on moral grounds.
A_D_E_P_T•25m ago
All the more when what Clearview has done is build an index of publicly available images, and associated URLs, derived from the freely-crawlable open web. Legal rulings in the US -- e.g., in Sorrell v. IMS Health -- consistently show that information aggregation and dissemination are treated as speech, so creating and distributing the Clearview index is protected expression under the First Amendment.
Also, Clearview is far from the only game in town. Lots of tech companies -- including some very large ones -- have facial recognition indexes. I suspect that Clearview is being made an example of, pour encourager les autres. But it seems a little bit exceptional, as though the law isn't being fairly or evenly applied.
impossiblefork•3m ago
This is threat personal data integrity and it doesn't really matter how the images were obtained. The threat to people exists despite the fact that they were on the public internet.