France’s National Commission for Information and Liberty (CNIL) announced Thursday it had issued a notice on November 1 to US-based facial recognition company Clearview AI ordering the company to halt personal data collection of subjects on French territory and delete the existing data.
CNIL noted Clearview extracts images of faces from social media sites, professional websites, blogs and videos. It then derives a mathematical “biometric template” of each face based on its features, enabling it to be matched to other images with similar templates. Clearview then sells this facial recognition tool to law enforcement agencies for identifying perpetrators or victims (such as from CCTV footage).
Following complaints from Privacy International and several individuals, CNIL investigated whether Clearview breached the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU’s overarching data privacy and protection law. First, Article 6 of the GDPR only permits data processing in certain cases, including when the subject has consented or for other legitimate interests to the extent that the use would not violate the subject’s fundamental rights. Clearview could not invoke “legitimate interests” since people’s fundamental freedoms override its purely commercial interests. CNIL specified that the “publicly accessible” nature of data does not authorize re-use without the subjects’ consent or knowledge. Second, Clearview breached Articles 12, 15 and 17 of the GDPR, which provide the data subject with the right to access and obtain the erasure of the personal data being processed.
While a statement attributed to Clearview founder CEO Hoan Ton-That maintains Clearview is outside the scope of the GDPR since it has no place of business or customers in the EU, Recital 24 to the GDPR makes it applicable wherever the personal data of subjects in the EU is being processed for monitoring, regardless of whether the processor itself is established in the EU.
In October, the European Parliament adopted a resolution to ban biometric identification, specifically noting concerns over Clearview’s model. Clearview, which also faced recent legal action in the UK, Australia and Illinois, must comply with CNIL’s notice within two months and provide supporting documentation or face sanctions under the French Data Protection Act of 1978.
