The American Civil Liberties Union on May 28 sued controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI, “to put a stop to its unlawful surreptitious capture and storage of millions of Illinoisans’ sensitive biometric identifiers". Clearview’s face surveillance activities violate the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), and represent an unprecedented threat to our security and safety, ACLU said in a statement. Their lawsuit, filed on behalf of organisations representing survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, undocumented immigrants, and other vulnerable communities, seeks an order declaring that Clearview’s conduct violates Illinois' privacy law, and for the company to "cease its unlawful activities". BIPA, which was enacted in 2008, requires companies to obtain written permission from subjects before the collection of a person’s biometric information. Illinois residents can sue companies for up to $5,000 for every privacy violation. The lawsuit was prepared by ACLU, ACLU of Illinois, and law firm Edelson PC. Clearview AI’s face recognition service is built on a database largely constructed by scouring through the millions of images available on the internet. Once you feed a person’s image into it, it pulls out all matching faces from its database. The software pulls facial data from all publicly available images online, including from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram, YouTube, news articles, and more. The result is a database of unprecedented scale — over 3 billion images to be exact — to readily identify any person walking on the street, with just a single image. Clearview's business model is a 'nightmare scenario' Images collected without people's…
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